Step 7 - Random Post about Technology

So I was going to write about how I interact with technology in my personal life, but then I had a great experience recently that perfectly illustrates the role it can and sometimes does play in my professional life.

For the past week, I've had various sixth graders ask me for help with an assignment, with wildly different descriptions of what their teacher was requiring. From what I could gather, they had to have a primary source from the Plymouth colony, preferably William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation.

Well, we don't have that book at my branch. Now, of course I could have ordered it, but their assignment was due pretty soon - and besides, there weren't enough copies for everyone in the class. I asked if they could use a different primary source.

"I guess..."

I also made sure to ask if they could use an electronic resource. A fair amount of teachers tell their students that they can't use anything "off the internet" instead of educating them as to why a resource may or may not be appropriate. A couple of the students said that they had to use a book, but the rest said yes.

So off I went to Homework Help, and drilled down to Colonial America 1600-1775 K-12 Resources, which had a good section of links to primary source documents. Early American Colonial Literature to 1700's section on William Bradford redirected me to a section on the first Thanksgiving.

This brought me to MayflowerHistory.com, which has a ton of primary source documents related to the colony, including letters and wills. Great, right? I printed out a bunch of different documents for the kids and bookmarked the page, thinking I was home free.

No dice. The next day, I had a parent come in with the actual assignment handout. It turns out that the primary source had to be a first-hand description of the first Thanksgiving.

So I backtracked to the William Bradford section of Early American Colonial Literature, which has a few chapters from Of Plymouth Plantation, but not the ones that I needed. So I started going through the rest of the links in the section. Mourt's Relation (1622) was the next page on the list.

Bingo! Section 6 had a detailed description of the first Thanksgiving, written by Edward Winslow.

Of course, in retrospect I should have just gone to Google Books. See, here's Of Plymouth Plantation. The first Thanksgiving is mentioned on page 153.

Well, now I have 2 sources for this ref question. The neatest thing about this whole process is that all of these resources are publicly available, at no cost to the library or the patron.