About

I'm Renee Romano, a professor of U.S. History at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. I developed this site in the summer of 2021 as the final project for the class, Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age, which I was taking as part of Graduate Certificate program in Digital Public Humanities at George Mason University. You can learn more about me and my work on my faculty page or at reneeromano.com.

I designed this site as an exercise for my class, History 244: The United States in World War II, but it could be used in any high school or college level history class to help students learn how to develop good questions for historical research. I chose to focus on this particular skill both because students are often intimidated when asked to develop their own research project and because learning to ask good questions involves so many other important historical thinking skills, such as closely analyzing sources, considering competing perspectives, and practicing historical empathy.

I built this learning activity with Google Sites because it's incredibly easy to learn and because I could integrate other Google tools, like Google Slides or Forms, directly into the site. It's also simple to embed materials created with other tools into a Google site website; I used involve.me to design the "Assess the Question" quiz; Animoto to do the film; and WordArt to create the word clouds.

If you're an educator who'd like to use this site, feel free to download the learning activities as a pdf that you can print and distribute to your own students or to contact me at rromano@oberlin.edu for other options to access the materials.