Both articles (Vecchiola, Edge) lay out the importance of giving students the knowledge of and the access to tools like Omeka and historical databases in promoting their active learning. Giving students both the means to do their own research and the understanding of how and why they should do their own research, in both authors’ experiences, has engaged students and promoted “doing history” in the classroom. Both articles also touch on the importance of ensuring students thoroughly understand how to access and effectively use these digital tools, as giving students these skills early on in their academic experience will not only promote engagement in the history classroom, but across every course they will do research in. One important thing to consider, however, when sending students out into the world of independent research, is the difficulty they may have in assessing a source for reliability. While the potential for misinformation may seem like a downside of promoting this type of active learning, it does not take away from the value of using these digital tools for research in the classroom, but instead provides another opportunity for teaching another valuable skill that will translate across the curriculum – analyzing a source for reliability!
Contributors: Molly Campbell, Noah Lesser, Mya Brown, Oliver Kasell, Libby Balog, Grace Ragsdale
