The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission has a website that features a report they’ve published about the epononymous event (thanks to Ed Cone for the link).  It is still exciting to me that I can get this kind of information without leaving the confines of my own office and the thought it sparked is how wonderful it must be for teachers in this day and age to have these resources available to them.  My next thought wasn’t so pleasant: do teachers even use sites like this as a resource, or more accurately, given the atmosphere of "teaching to the test" that they work in today do they have the flexibility to incorporate this kind of resource into their curricula?  Unfortunately I suspect the answer to the latter is a negative.

I know for a fact that my kids use the internet to do their own research (with a lot of guidance from their parents seeing as they might be tempted to quote Runescape as a historical reference), but I can’t think of any recent occurrences of a teacher pointing them to a web-based resource.  Is it because the teachers don’t want to use the web in this way or is it because they can’t?