The dreams and predictions of a digital classroom never quite materialized in the social studies history area. For a variety of reasons teachers keep the technology just outside the door peeking in but never truly welcomed. Not welcomed because of the nature of courseware initially offered, not welcomed because the technology was advanced for the sake of technology itself and was imposed on the teacher. For teachers to invite digital technology in attention should be on the curriculum, the teacher's delivery of curriculum and how the technology can assist and advance deeper understandings.

This paper deals with the impact of current digital technology revolution on history education. Based on four developments engendered by this revolution (liberalization of historical knowledge, intensification of digital archives, web-based communication, and active computer-based learning), it argues that digital history has the potential to offer powerful tools for inquiry-based learning in the classroom. The Virtual Historian, a newly created web-based program, is used as an example of the potential impact of such technology on students' historical learning.

The Historica Foundation of Canada has a mandate to provide or support programs and resources for the teaching of Canadian history in Canadian schools. This paper outlines how Historica discovered what was needed and the programs and resources they developed to fulfill their mandate.

Judging from public debate and policy, there is renewed interest about the state of young peoples' civic engagement, their character development and their knowledge levels about public issues. At the same time, there are persistent concerns about the narrow and nationalist construction of the very curriculum which should be challenging young peoples' ideas and perceptions of the world in Social Studies or History curricula. The following article discusses some of the ways in which the Developing a Global Perspective for Educators/Développement d'une perspective globale pour enseignants et enseignantes" initiative at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa aims to address the knowledge deficit, the paucity of pedagogical skills and the provision of curricula with pre-service students.

This article promotes the on-line use of primary documents from Library and Archives of Canada (LAC) collections by high school students conducting historical inquiry into a major historic event in Canada's past. It outlines a unit of seven history lessons that the author wrote for the 'Learning Centre' at www.collectionscanada.ca/education/index-e.html, a website recently created by LAC. The unit: 'Canada and the Cold War: The Gouzenko Affair' offers a variety of student-centered, skill-oriented teaching/learning strategies with supporting on-line resources. A major criterion for these educational resources is that they fit into the official curricula of each province and territory in Canada.

This article discusses the importance of teachers integrating new educational research into their classroom instruction. The mandatory grade 10 History course in Ontario is used as an example of how such integration leads to improved teacher instruction and therefore student learning.

In working with new teachers and teacher candidates in teacher education with the many demands placed upon them, it makes sense to combine a number of learning goals. The following article examines the idea that literacy, technology, and subject curriculum goals are a powerful combination. Indeed, critical literacy with a stress on inferring, is a necessary component of sound use of the internet for source-based history. This article presents two simple but powerful templates for analyzing sources followed by examples of a key literacy orientation for busy teachers to use both on line and face-to-face in classrooms from grades 7-12. It concludes with a research agenda in the form of some key questions for some of the unexamined issues in the integration of critical literacy and information technology in the history classroom.