When considering what to do make my Honors English III and AP Lit classes paperless, and more so bookless this year I had to generate content that was less content based and more based on skill. Confused? So was I when I set out to do this in August, just a day before classes started, and just five days after I found out that a Central York High School classroom would again be my home as I’d returned from a stint as a substitute administrator in the spring of 2014. I wanted challenging material that was easy to access across platforms and did not require me to have books. Though I flirted with the idea of an iBook, time did not allow for me to create one and I didn’t want to wrestle with a project in the fall. | |
I was able to build a storehouse of information and resources from colleges and universities across the nation. Most of these resources were primary source documents, and in some cases of historical archiving, the real images of the documents were present for the students to pore over. Here is an example from The New England Primer, a seminal and foundational work in Puritan literature. |
This was important on two planes, first it showed the students the actual text as it appeared and forced them to stretch to decode and decipher the text. Second, it allowed the students to see the text and make connections they might not have otherwise been able to glean through a cleaned up version presented in a tidy PDF. Many of the best research universities around the country and globally are taking on major archival projects, take your topic of interest and find out today what is happening to the original documents, you might be surprised.
The second part of this entry is based on helping students find scholarly research. While Google Scholar and some of the databases are nice places to begin, the generation and use of open source projects around the world are taking research to the next level. By using the Digital Commons Network students are thrust into the most current research in the field, for free. These papers have typically been located in abstract only format or housed at pay for access sites such as JSTOR. Be careful though, this requires you to be investigative and curious about topics as well, but the upside is we can now really be experts in our fields with the most current research right in our hands. No longer are the students bound to hypothesis and speculation, which are great tools to begin the job, but in the end are really as useful as an axe to hang drywall in the finishing stages of the process. | |
Enjoy. Be interested. Be interesting. Be courageous.
Ancient through Contemporary Humanities: Hanover College (IN) Early Americas Digital Archive (Home to many Primary Sources) University of Maryland |