RiverWeb Teachers Guide

The Teacher's Guide to RiverWeb

INTRODUCTION

We created this guide to help teachers utilize the materials available on the RiverWeb CD-Rom and Web site. Each section of RiverWeb is designed for use as a supplement to an individual lecture or series of lectures, and for this reason they are organized in a fairly linear fashion. However, this does not mean that the sections do not complement each other; indeed, at many points the information in each overlap and there are a number of interconnected hyperlinks that allow the user to explore the entire RiverWeb site regardless of starting point. The materials presented can be utilized in high school and college and university classrooms, and are useful in a variety of settings ranging from broad American history surveys to more specific histories of Illinois or the American Bottom region to classes dealing with music or railroads.

It is important to remember that for many students, using computers can often be intimidating, especially for those with little prior experience. One of the biggest mistakes a teacher can make is to assume that all students work at the same computer literacy level. Too often teachers give students given computer assignments without clear instructions and explanations, and because of this the students can develop negative attitudes towards computers and computer-related teaching applications. The safest maxim to follow is that the more complex the task, the greater the chance that beginning students will get lost somewhere along the way, and this is especially true for multi-media assignments and applications.

We created The Student's Guide to RiverWeb to help minimize student frustration surrounding this program, and indeed any multi-media application they might later encounter. Teachers wishing to utilize RiverWeb in their courses should familiarize themselves with this guide, although the information contained in it also appears in the Teacher Guide in slightly modified form. The goal of the Student Guide is to help students better navigate, utilize, and understand the materials presented on the RiverWeb CD-Rom and World Wide Web sites. The goal of the Teacher's Guide is to help you think of ways that you can use the RiverWeb materials in your classroom lectures and as homework assignments.

We divided the RiverWeb materials into individual sections designed as supplements to a more general classroom lectures. There are four major themes developed on this RiverWeb CD-Rom: the Mississippi River and the Early Illinois Settlements; East St. Louis, Illinois - A Prototypical River Town?; Artery of a Nation: River Transportation, Railroads, and the Mississippi River; and A Music of the People: American Culture and the Blues on the Mississippi. Some of the sections contain so much material that division into a number of sub-sections became necessary, but each includes a full explanation. The sections were designed to complement each other, and these connections are emphasized to help students better understand the way that one subject is intertwined with another, seemingly very different one. Because the aim of these supplements is to give students an introduction to the use of academic technologies and history, we created an additional section to provide an overview of how we can use computers to study history. This is the first section of the study guides, and should be the first subject broached before utilizing the RiverWeb materials.

Each part of the Study Guide is divided into six sub-sections. The first is "Pedagogical Approaches," and suggests some of the best ways in which to use this material. The second section, "Explanation of Content," enables students and teachers to better place each of the RiverWeb units into a broader historical content. The third section, "Questions to Think About," gives students an idea of what to look for while reading the RiverWeb materials as well as any supplemental materials you might assign relating to the texts, and are also designed for use as classroom discussion questions. The fourth part, "Possible Assignments," gives students an idea of the kind of homework you might ask them to complete using the RiverWeb and supplemental materials. While you do not have to actually assign this work (although they certainly would make fine paper topics and homework assignments), they are provided in order to allow students to think about how to approach such a project in order to better prepare them to face similar tasks in the future. The fifth section, "Further Reading," gives teachers a place to go for additional information related to the RiverWeb materials. The final section, "Other Links of Interest" allows both students and teachers to explore other multi-media sites on the World Wide Web, and can be used in conjunction with search engines such as Alta Vista (https://www.altavista.com) and Webcrawler (https://www.webcrawler.com) to help them answer the study questions and assignments. We highly recommend you explore other Web sites and coordinate their materials with what you find on the RiverWeb CD-Rom and Web site.

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