training to equip teachers to use its resources. For an extensive list of other organizations that provide access to primary source information you may visit social studies central.

Teachers who want to maximize the effectiveness of using primary sources in their classrooms will appreciate the following tips.

1. Utilize local personalities and individuals who can address the class on various subjects by giving eye witness accounts or sharing their how-to" expertise in a given area.

2. Use computers in the classroom and learning centers to help students access historical moments in the making, online interviews, and websites that provide primary source materials.

3. Visit the primary sources webpage referenced above and identify different primary sources that can be accessed via computer and/or mail, to acquire materials to enrich the overall learning experience.

4. Use Document Based Questions (DBQ's) for classroom assignments that will require that students access primary sources for the answers.

5. Take classroom field trips to museums, historical places, and buildings where documents of historical significance are housed.

6. Visit local libraries and show students how to use archived newspapers to access historical events.

7. Encourage students to choose international pen pals as a means of learning about other cultures.

8. Show an item of historical significance that is not used today and challenge students to hunt for clues, via the internet, as to its origins and use.

9. Visit a cemetery that contains older gravestones. Ask students to choose a gravestone and then research the time frame in which the person lived and died. Challenge them to discover the culture, trends, and prevailing diseases or conditions of war that might have caused the deceased's death.

10. Give students a photograph of an individual in period dress, or a picture of a famous painting and ask them to research to find out what they from the photo.

Primary sources can provide hours of innovative learning and endless answers to the many questions that students learn to ask. Used to stimulate a quest for knowledge, they can help students develop critical thinking skills and self-motivation. Those who are taught through the medium of primary sources become seekers of the truth and treasure hunters looking for clues from precious documents and artifacts of the past.

Students also learn that the world is really not a big place, but a community of seekers who can all come together under the umbrella of twenty-first century technology. Through the use of the internet and advanced methods of communications, classrooms have access to individuals as well as recorded information that make up an enormous pool of primary sources.

Perhaps most importantly, students who have been taught to utilize primary sources discover that studying can be fun and go on to become apprentices of the process of lifelong learning.

Learn more about this author, Dr. Deborah Bauers.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

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