Submitted by: Trish Lyons
Collaborators: Greg Metcalf
School: Deep Run High School

Summary

To supplement the school newspaper and provide an online presence for updated student news coverage, the Deep Run student newspaper (The Sentinel) staff wanted to build a website. This required students to research news websites and styles, define the purpose of the site, define the presentation method for the site, define the implementation timeline, design the material collection / workflow method, launch the site, and update it bi-weekly!

The Sentinel is now online via a WordPress blog and can be found at

Submitted by: Morgan Hendrick (amshenrick)
School: Brookland Middle School

Summary

With the explosion of information available at student’s fingertips, it is easy for students to confuse accurate information with inaccurate information. Evaluating the accuracy of website information is an important 21st century skill that student’s need to acquire, as research will be something student’s will continue to do their entire lives. In this lesson students will learn how to evaluate websites for relevancy and accuracy and create their own tool to help them evaluate other websites in the future.

Submitted by: Debbie Gilfillan
Collaborators:
School: Pocahontas Middle School

Summary

Students choose an individual who has faced and overcome adversity. While researching this individual, students design a presentation that incorporates a Word Wizard role, a Discussion Leader role, and a Summarizer role, as well as any other roles that the students would like to use. Students then use their research to write historical fiction interviews featuring the individual that they researched.
(This is part of a larger unit that begins with student reading, analyzing and interpreting “Hard as Nails” by Russell Baker, “Water” by Helen Keller, Miss Spitfire by Sarah Miller, and “Zlata’s
Diary” by Zlata Filipovic.)

Submitted by: Wiley Hunnicutt
School: Freeman High School

Summary

The thematic elements of fear, flight, and fate run through Richard Wright’s seminal work Native Son.  Wright’s novel is comprised of three parts entitled Fear, Flight, and Fate.

Each group was tasked with finding visual and auditory representations of each book in Native Son.   Students searched for and discussed their finds and your choices.  They wrote about why they made the choices they made for each book (three paragraphs minimum) in addition to presenting this information to the class in a dynamic, rehearsed presentation replete with visuals as well as musical accompaniment and the site produced for this lesson.

Submitted by: Deana Miller and Andrea Gooch
Collaborators: Katherine Kier
School: The Academy at Virginia Randolph

Summary

The Bizarre Bazaar Christmas Collection Craft Show is looking for fresh new vendors this year!  Students are asked to come up with a fresh, new, innovative, crafty, idea that could hypothetically be sold at The Annual Bizzare Bazaar Christmas Collection Craft Show.  Students will come up with a craft and collaborate with peers to create a presentation on how to create the craft.  The student groups will be composed of at least one English student and one Art student.  The students may choose any craft they want.  The group will be responsible for mastering the craft and then decide on a way to share their instructions to an audience in a fun, easy-to-follow, accurate, how-to presentation.

Submitted by: Valerie Kramer, Theresa Steele, James Harvey Stone
School: Hermitage High School

Summary

Students in three different subject areas at two different schools read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Teachers and students discuss the historic background and basic philosophical concepts of the literature. Each class watches six videos (selected by the teacher) for the purpose of exploring the literature through animation, sound, film, etc. Teachers set up an online poll on dotvoting.org where students vote for the video that best translates the literature into the medium of film. The video with the most votes will appear on a student generated webpage about the allegory. Students from all the classes use the same voting venue (dotvoting.org). Teachers share results with students, and introduce them to the blog created for the project. Then students introduce themselves and their course of study on the blog so that all learners can communicate with each other online from their classroom or from home. Following the individual post, students group themselves based on designated, subject-specific topics. Student groups consider how their topic relates to the literature. Each group posts a response on the blog. In a final reflective post, students individually consider and share how the concepts, philosophy, and lessons from The Allegory of the Cave are relative to their lives and/or the time in which we live. As a final group activity, students publish the selected video and posts to a website for viewing by a larger audience.

Submitted by: Caroline Wheeler
School: Varina High School

Summary

Urban legends fascinate, disturb, and ultimately entertain all of us—students and teachers alike. The Urban Legends lesson bridges the study of legends, one of the major tenets of world literature, and modern folklore. For many students, the stuff of literature and the stuff of real life seem worlds apart.  An extension from traditional legends and mythology units of study, this online research based lesson plan provides students with an opportunity to connect literature to everyday life and enables students to use technological skills and approaches to explore, understand, and evaluate the different types and purposes of modern, urban legends. Students will gain deeper insight into the similarities of literature of different cultures and eras and will develop more relevant understandings of the cultural and social functions of oral literature. The Urban Legends lesson is designed to foster and promote students’ approaching and ideal information fluency skills. In addition, this 21st Century lesson also promotes group communication and collaboration. Using understandings gained during from their research, students will create an innovative 21st Century product to showcase understandings and criticisms to less informed, more gullible peers.

The Urban Legends lesson, inspired creative thinking, by allowing them to discover that it is OK not to believe everything they hear and encourage creative risk taking. Students had to go outside of their comfort zones to create a 21st Century product to showcase their findings.

Submitted by: Ashley Taylor
School: Varina High School

Summary

Students will engage in a 90 minute lesson to introduce them to the internet world of nonfiction. During this lesson, students will realize that all information on the World Wide Web is not true and will have to look at various websites and determine whether or not the information provided is fraudulent. This is important when using the internet for research projects, papers, and seeking general information.

Submitted by: Jennifer L. Jones
School: Hermitage High School

Summary

The Gatsby Line project is assigned to students after they read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This novel features decadent lifestyles in 1920’s America and the materialistic preoccupation of its main characters. The Gatsby Line project engages students in the creation of a modern advertisement for the clothes, cars, or homes of the time in an effort to cultivate an understanding and appreciation of the 1920’s. To add a modern twist and relevancy, students imagine their clothing designs are from Project Runway; the car designs are from the Detroit Auto Show, and the house is an HGTV Dream Home. The goal for this project is to have students analyze two things: the materialist elements in the novel and the art of persuasion. Throughout the year, the students study persuasive techniques, and this project gives them an opportunity to implement persuasive strategies while displaying their perception of the clothes, homes, and cars in The Great Gatsby. In addition, symbolism is prevalent in this novel, so the project allows them to choose key symbols, work the symbols into the illustration, and explain what they think each symbol represents.

Submitted by: Gina Brooks
School: Fairfield Middle School

Summary

Students read the novel No Promises in the Wind by Irene Hunt, which illustrates a story of two runaways during the Great Depression. Over the course of the unit, there were several discussions on the causes, effects, and consequences of the Great Depression. A common theme was the concept of survival during a time of economic distress. Students are given an average wage for the time period and are asked to develop a budget that takes into account expenses such as food, rent, etc.