At a recent conference this writer told teachers that their students should not be recreating already existing web resources. He shared that if another web resource has done it “better” such as a Civil War web resource, then teachers are probably wasting their students' time in creating their own web resource (Wiki, blog, podcast, website, imovie, etc.) on the same topic. He mentioned that many students' web projects are modified cut-and-paste activities. He argued that “learning by doing” only works when higher level thinking is involved.

• How will the students' work be more focused on the learning goal than other web sites? Will their work more directly focus on a specific learning such as “causes of war” instead of the generalized learning of “war” about a topic? Also, instead of just listing the causes of the Civil War, the students focus on explaining the conditions that lead to each cause.
• How will the students' learning in this project be more comprehensive than in other web resources? Will the students show more aspects of the problem? Will they show the many alternatives that the historical people thought about before deciding on their solution? Will they talk about the effectiveness of the solution?
• How will the pupils' learning be more personal? Will students simply repeat information about the Civil War such as the dates of the Battle of Gettysburg in a very abstract non-personal manner or will they take the Civil War and show its impact on their own community then and now? For example, how did the Civil War impact on their community and what are some long term effects of that War on their community?
• How will the students' project be more in-depth than other resources? Will the students show go beyond a simple statement such “The Civil War impacted the country”? Will they show the many different ways that the Civil War divided the nation and how each different division had different consequences?
• How will the students' work show more perspectives than other web resources? Will they show the same issue from multiple perspectives such as the Civil War as viewed by the slave-owners, non-slave owners, slaves, politicians, state governments, “big business”, people living near the North-South border, people living far away from the border, military officers and soldiers?
• How will the students' work be more formative than other resources? Will they have many built-in peer-assessments and self-assessments into their web presence so the the audience can measure their own progress throughout the learning? Will the student creators be constantly assessing their own progress in the learning standard as they create this resource?
• How will the students' activity connect the topic to other related topics that are not presently online? Will they only do a Civil War report or will they connect the US Civil War to other US wars, to Civil Wars in other countries, and to separatists' movements in various countries?
• How will the students' work include more visual, sound or other resources than in already existing web sites? Will the students have many different visual images for each event for the visual learners? Will they have many different sound resources for each event for the auditory learner? Will they have resources that involve doing or movement for the kinesthetic learner?
• How will the students' future web activity help to structure the learning better for their audience than present learning resources do? Will the students carefully walk the audience through the various aspects of the topic in such a way that the logical progression is very clear? Will they explain complex concepts about the topic in easy-to-understand terms?
• How will the students' work be on a higher level of thinking than the present web resources? Will the students use their higher level skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation in their future work on the Civil War or will they simply cut-and-paste facts from existing documents?
• How will the students re-enact a particular event in such a way as to provide new insight into the event that other resources do not provide? If they simply act out a particular event such as Lee's surrender to Grant by just changing the words, then they have added no new knowledge to the event. If, instead they have the students talk about the thoughts in each person's head as this event takes place, they can add a richness of information.

With these guidelines, teachers can create new web 2.0 resources that create a richer learning environment both for their own students and for the audience of the web resources.

Dr. Harry Grover Tuttle focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.

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