My year 6 students are about to undertake an independent research project on World War 2 using Honeycomb to produce a series of web pages. They will be required to choose a personality from the period and find useful websites about that person, collect links, write a short biog, find copyright free images etc. They'll then present that information how they want as a web page.
When asking the classes for their ideas about who to research, I got some fairly predictable answers such as Anne frank and Winston Churchill, however, I was really surprised by the number of children who wanted to research Hitler. Clearly they have a perfectly legitimate interest in this person as they have learned some basic information about the Blitz and the Holocaust etc. However, I am worried about letting the children do independent research on him as there is obvioulsy a proliferation of nasty holocaust denial and extreme right wing websites and forums that attempt to rewrite history.
In a previous post I talked about the work that the children did with the Allaboutexplorers website, and it was patently clear that they were accepting the nonsense that was presented. So the choices are these: prescribe who they are allowed to research (suggestions welcomed) and not include Hitler; or, allow them to research Hitler but present them with a list of sources that they are allowed to use.
Creative Commons image by P/\ul on Flickr