Materials

• Copies of the A Day in the Life of Colonial America Worksheet
• Copies of the Internet Glossary
• Bookmarks to A Colonial Family and Community website (http://www.thehenryford.org/exhibits/smartfun/colonial/intro/index.html)
• Pencils

Procedures

1. Create a schedule for your computer time.
2. Distribute the Internet Glossary.
3. Before students begin this project, review some strategies that will help students navigate through a website, such as back, favorites, and refresh/reload.
4. Invite students to demonstrate and practice these strategies.
5. In groups or individually, tell students that they will find out about daily life in colonial America by exploring a website you set as a bookmark or favorite.
6. Show them how to get to the site A Colonial Family and Community.
7. As you give students their A Day in the Life of Colonial America Worksheet, point out that the information needed to complete the activities can be found at the assigned website.
   
8. Encourage students to complete the entire website quiz as well as the activity sheet. You might also have students note and discuss strategies they used to navigate the website and/or any problems they encountered.

Extension Activities

• Have students work in small groups to create a story about living in colonial America. To help students make their stories authentic encourage them to search the Web for primary materials.
• Students can take part in a "Colonial Newscast" by reading articles that tell about factual events in colonial America. Have them search the Web for primary materials about colonial America. They can search for interesting news, take notes on the major points, and deliver newscasts, either individually or as part of a panel discussion.
  
• Challenge students to create travel brochures for Colonial Williamsburg. Their brochures could be print material, or students could use images, text, and movies to create multimedia brochures. Students can begin their research by visiting Colonial Williamsburg at Experience Colonial Life (http://www.history.org/).

Standards Correlations

National Technology Education Standards


• Students will demonstrate a sound understanding of the nature and operation of technology systems.
• Students will use technology to locate, evaluate, and collect information from a variety of sources.
  
• Students will practice responsible use of technology systems, information, and software.

  National Social Studies Education Standards
  

• Students will identify and describe significant historical periods and patterns of change within and across cultures.
• Students will systematically employ processes of critical historical inquiry to reconstruct and interpret the past, such as using a variety of sources and checking their credibility, validating, and weighing evidence for claims, and searching for causality.
  
• Students will apply ideas, theories, and modes of historical inquiry to analyze historical and contemporary developments.

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Assessment

4 – Exemplary Understanding
Student:

• has a thorough understanding of how to use navigational skills to find information at a website.
  
• evaluates quality of websites independently.
  
• uses online information to draw and support valid conclusions about life in colonial America.
  
• produces a short essay that is creative, well organized, and uses online information as the basis for the writing.

3 – Competent Understanding
Student:

• navigates the Internet with very few problems and uses navigational tools within a website.
• evaluates website quality with some guidance.
  
• draws conclusions about life in colonial America using online information, but may or may not support those conclusions.
  
• produces a short essay that uses online information, but it is not thorough.

2 - Developing Understanding
Student:

• uses navigational tools within a site with guidance.
  
• evaluates website quality with guided questioning.
  
• needs help to draw and support valid conclusions about life in colonial America.
  
• produces a piece of writing that is poorly organized and/or contains few details gathered from online sources.

1 - Emerging Understanding
Student:

• shows interest in using the Internet to gather information.
• uses simple strategies to navigate within the website.
  
• needs prompting to stay on task.
  
• experiences difficulty using the online information to create a thoughtful piece of writing.