Internet-Enriched Lesson

Overview and Purpose

The purpose of this site is to offer English teachers and students ideas and resources for using primary sources in their research and writing.  In addition, students' writings can be posted to student-created blogs for sharing and further developing.  

This set of lessons are scalable in that the teacher can decide to what degree he or she would like to use primary sources in future research, as well as, how many entries the blogs will have.  This blog project can be a one-time assignment, or it can evolve into an on-going course summary.

The teacher can also decide to what degree students will collaborate, even if the teacher only clusters links on a class blog under a common heading.  Many other options are available for collaboration: between students, classes, across a school district, a state, or even a county.  

The general progression is for students to use primary sources as a basis for research.  This would be appropriate as an activity in conjunction with a class reading of a poem, an essay, or a novel, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Writing strategies, such as compare and contrast, persuasive, or argumentative could be used as students analyze primary documents, images, audio, or video.  Then, as students have crafted their writings, they can add posts to their blog.  Again, the teacher can decide what the project will look like in their classroom: Comments on posts? Video-feedback for responses? Co-editing of blogs? Etc.

Relative advantages

• Students can work on their research and writing anywhere, anytime
• Students have access to quality information for research purposes
• Students will have authentic audiences for their published writing
• Teachers will have convenient access to their students' work

Prerequisites

Several assumptions are made before beginning:

• Students have regular access to computers
• Students have accounts through Google Apps for Education
• Teachers have knowledge of blog creation and maintenance, or at least can access support

Instructional Objectives

Common Core standards are addressed: Click here to go to CCSS page

ISTE Standards for students are addressed:  Click here to go to ISTE page

These are basic instructional objectives that 

• Given blog instructions, the student will create, develop, and maintain a blog in order to collaborate and publish work in a variety of forms (written, images, video) measured by criteria shared by the teacher in rubric form (see For Teachers tab)
• Given primary source resources, the student will explore, find, and select resources that are relevant to the topic.
• Given Analysis tools, the student will practice analyzing primary sources in a variety of formats in order better use the information
• Given resources and instruction on standard styles, the student will ethically use information by properly citing all sources.

Lesson progression

1. Students will be told what literature that they will use as the basis for the research and writing (focus on historical context, themes, present/past comparison, etc.)
2. Students will spend time setting up and customizing their blog based on predetermined criteria (in the form of a rubric).
3. Students will use the provided analysis tools and websites to find information to use
4. Students will write to teacher specifications for the assignment, including citations using the provided resources
5. Students will post to their blogs and share