Why Use AwesomeStories? - Using Primary Sources

Just because today's students know how to communicate with the Internet, doesn’t mean they are proficient users of the Internet.

Teaching students to scrutinize the information they find, encouraging their engagement with critical analysis and giving them the freedom to form personal opinions—based on accurate and real-world facts—develops the 21st-Century skills they need to succeed. 

These skills do not come naturally to students who often stop researching when the first resource pops-up in their browser.

To some extent, we are all guilty of this—using the first apparently relevant resource we find—but here's the difference: While educators know that depth-of-research yields understanding, which remains and grows beyond test day, students don’t know that extending their reach into the Internet treasure chest of Primary Sources will deepen their understanding and growth.

AwesomeStories provides easy searchable access to its archive—which culls media sources from 100+ world-renowned archives—and connects teachers and students directly to hundreds of thousands of original documents, images, video and first-hand reports that are the “raw material” of research.

These featured, hand-curated resources are not found—for the most part—by using traditional search engines; students, therefore, will not easily find them. But with AwesomeStories, not only do students find the buried resources that reveal deeper dimensions of their chosen topics, they also learn how to use these sources to gain insights and build knowledge.

Along the way, they also learn how to properly cite their sources.