One of the most frequently asked questions is "how do I find government information?". While you can teach students to use search terms like an Agency name ( e.g. Congress.gov), give them the tools to think beyond this and critically think about who might have the information they need. Try these search strategies with your students:
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Search 1: by site Examples: <topic> site:.usda.gov. <topic> site:statueofliberty.org/ellis-island <topic> site:nps.gov Ask students to think about what agency might have the information they want, and then instigate this kind of search. Invite them to use this first, but don't limit themselves to this... running a <topic> search and site:.gov will bring up many surprises. |
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Search 2: by domain This tells the brower to search within a particular domain. Examples: <topic> site:.gov. <topic> site:.edu. <topic> site:.com. |
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Search 3: by keywords This searches your topic AND primary sources or your topic AND lib guides or your topic AND government. This is just another way of writing an AND search.
Examples: <topic> primary sources. <topic>lib guide. <topic>government |
NOTE:
The search string includes no spaces between the word “site” and the colon and the next word: “Cold War” site:loc.gov. If you use the space, you’ll still get results, but your browser will think that you want it to search the term “site” along with the others so it could skew slightly your results.
Teaching strategies can be applied to any content area, across all grade levels and assignments. The following are offered to jumpstart your thinking:
1. The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) is now: The Digital Inquiry Group. It offers a wide range of teaching strategies you can implement tomorrow from Reading like a Historian to the assessment tools of Beyond the Bubble, there are many ideas you can apply to any primary source and historical concept.
2. Use the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Analysis tool with any document, image or artifact.
3. Harvard's Project Zero offers the Circle of Viewpoints strategy - so useful in so many ways! Use a single document and ask students to look at it through many lenses; OR assign them a single viewpoint and then jump into a great discussion!
4. Teach question-building with the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) from the Right Question Institute.