Actually, we are trying to figure out ways to deepen our students' understanding of history using new technology. While teaching at Beachwood High School in 1997, I developed web-based materials to support my ninth grade students' study of world history.  That history course was already a problem-based study of the past. In the course, I posed a number of authentic historical problems to our students. They, in turn, worked on the problems using the methods, resources, concepts and procedures of historians.Students interpreted and analyzed resources to build arguments or make historical cases.Though I created over 1,000 webpages for the course, the computer did not change the disciplinary focus of this course in any way.  Why go to all this effort of putting a course on the web?Is there evidence it's worth the work? Those are good questions. Unfortunately I do not know the answers ....yet. I do have some guesses and some modest evidence. For example, it appears that the computer and the Internet allows students to move beyond the limits of the classroom and materials-on-hand. This enriches their study of history by allowing them to interact with sources and people outside their classroom.Students are able to represent their ideas in different ways.  The design possibilities of HTML should enable teachers and students to show their thinking in more dynamic ways. Using research and theory from cognitive fields, a teacher might make the computer a powerful tool to support student growth and mediate student thinking.  In other words, the computer can help teachers support student thinking in new ways, expanding and unifying the pedagogical power of the classroom.  Unfortunately that is not the way history educators have been using the new technology.  Too often teachers use the computer to "beam" students to archives or libraries or museums or online primary sources. Such use confuses access to information with the use of that information.  The real instructional problem for history teachers and students is to find ways to use the available information in more sophisticated ways.  In this website, I tried to make the computer a tool to help students learn to work like historians.  I designed each page specifically to provide interactive support to help students make sense of history and the history classroom, and to engage in historical inquiry as they located evidence, analyzed sources, explained historical phenomenon and represented their understanding to others.  Will students' understanding deepen by using such specially designed new technology? Will their love for the discipline grow? Will the technology improve learning? These are critical questions we are asking of this work.  Unfortunately, we do not know.... yet! We have just begun to analyze our evidence and we don't know enough to say ... yet. As for us, well, we really don't know too much about computers or the internet.....yet. We are just learning ourselves ....only beginners. However, we do subscribe to the words of wisdom from one of our greatest philosophers--Yogi Berra-- who said, "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so." We must be OK because there is not very much we know for sure about the relationship between computers and learning. So, join us...go on... explore the sample pages that follow.... and please let us know what you think!  Use the Presentation Index that follows to guide your exploration. Top [Presentation Index]    Please let me know what you think by contacting Bob Bain bbain@umich.edu University of Michigan School of Education 610 E. University Ave. 1302E SEB Ann Arbor, Michigan (48109-1259) voice: 734-615-0585