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April 15, 2003
Bringing History to Life
By Ron Schachter
Middle and high school students can visit the virtual past with three media-rich, Web-based history programs.
The traditional history curriculum gets a digital makeover, courtesy of three interactive, multimedia approaches to teaching students about the past. We looked at ABC-CLIO's World History, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's Electronic Field Trips, and SAS inSchool's Curriculum Pathways. At the center of these Web-delivered courses are student activities that bring history alive through explorations of topics on the menu of most history teachers.
The programs we reviewed all put primary source documents within easy reach and optimize multimedia features using audio and video clips. Each also provides teachers with standards-correlated lesson plans and offline activities. Where these Web-based offerings differ, however, is in their approach to teaching history. Whereas ABC-CLIO's World History offers a more traditional text-based approach to charting major historical people, places, and events, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and SAS sites make historical discovery an organic process by asking students to examine primary source historical documents and use online tools to build their responses. Together, they make for an eclectic range of options for tracing the timelines of the past.
World History (ABC-CLIO)
ABC-CLIO's World History provides a comprehensive and well-written treatment of key historical developments from 1500 to the present day. This site-as well as its American History counterpart-revolves around a series of interesting "Topic Explorations" within 10 historical eras, such as the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution, World Wars I and II, and the World Beyond Europe.
For each of these time periods, visitors can select from a number of subject-based explorations, which typically include introductory articles, profiles of key people, automated quizzes, and creative activities that encourage additional Web-based research.
Click on the Industrial Revolution category, for example, and you'll find seven Topic Explorations covering changes in science, economics, transportation, and urbanization. Related articles, biographical links, primary source documents, images, and statistical tables accompany subject areas, including a selection by British political economist Thomas Malthus, who chronicled the consequences of rapid population growth. Interactive student activities accompany lessons. In one, young historians visit a virtual museum exhibit to view photographs of New York's Lower East Side tenements of the era, and then write a proposal for improving working conditions of the time.
While World History delivers a broad spectrum of resources, the site offers few of the interactive experiences named above, instead relying primarily on text-based content and links to other history Web sites. However, helpful reference tools allow teachers and librarians to create, save, and post customized research lists of selected articles, supplementary materials, and activities online.
Electronic Field Trip: Influenced by None (The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
Each year, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation offers monthly project-based Web excursions focused on a different aspect of life and times in colonial America. Students participating in each journey take part in a variety of interactive learning experiences, analyzing historical documents and events and making informed choices from among primary and secondary sources.
Topics for the 2002-2003 school year range from British and American spies during the Revolutionary War to slavery in the colonies to the role of journalism in America. We looked at Influenced by None, a hands-on Web adventure in which students create a newspaper.
An easy-to-use interface lets individual or groups of students produce their own daily editions covering the Boston Massacre, Virginia Governor Dunmore's proclamation freeing slaves for their military service, and the First Continental Congress. Young editors write their features after studying the ruling political parties of the day and select a Whig, Patriot, or neutral bias, in addition to supporting documents, to reconstruct the flavor of 18th century prose conventions.
Influenced by None effectively embeds both audio and visual media to illustrate the sights and sounds of the colonial period. Additionally, each trip launches with a live, two-hour-long broadcast via public and cable television and the Web, in which students can interact with the program's historical experts by calling in or e-mailing their questions. (Archived videotapes of this and other broadcasts are also available for those who are not able to view it live.) On the discussion boards, students can e-mail historical figures featured in the broadcast, e.g., George Washington or Thomas Jefferson (played by CWF staff), and vote on significant issues of the day. Teachers will appreciate standards-based lesson plans and an electronic mailing list where they can exchange ideas and suggestions.
Curriculum Pathways (SAS inSchool)
SAS inSchool also builds interactive exercises around primary source documents and multimedia to help students develop persuasive essays and debates on important historical issues. Students begin their inquiry with lead questions called InterActivities, such as "Should the government break up Standard Oil's monopoly" or "Does the Civilian Conservation Corps represent a significant improvement in the government's policy", which serve as points of departure for research activities.
Students view informative, documentary-style videos online and then proceed to analyze and select supporting evidence from five source documents, such as John D. Rockefeller's defense of Standard Oil and a newspaper article by muckraker Ida M. Tarbell. A Document Analyzer tool lets them cut and paste quotable passages, indicate which side of the lead question the text supports, and then add their own analysis, a final step that provides needed practice in looking critically at documents and connecting them effectively to a research question. A Create Organizer tool usefully assembles the selected passages and student comments, along with the original focus question and writing tips, on a single, printable page that becomes a worksheet for a student's essay or presentation.
While these tools work very well to get students thinking about and responding to historical subjects, primary sources included with the program come up thin at times. With only five brief primary source selections from which to choose, student projects may fall short on complexity and diversity of thought, making the offering more suitable for the middle grades rather than the high school audience for which it is intended.
SAS inSchool offers nine online U.S. History InterActivities on topics ranging from the Stamp Act and the Mexican-American War to Johnson and the Vietnam War. In the Modern America Emerges section, for example, which features the InterActivity on the Standard Oil monopoly, students can also explore World War I through an online encyclopedia, take sides in a classroom debate over the conflicting positions of labor unions and big businesses, and conduct a long-range research project using Web sites related to the immigrant experience.
Ronald Schachter, a former high school English teacher, currently works as an online curriculum designer and freelance writer in Newton, Mass.
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