Submitted by: JaNee Jones & Sarah Billups
School: Varina High School

Summary

The objective of the “Can you hear me now?” unit is to provide students with the tools to effectively and powerfully express themselves. This creative and informational unit will develop student centered learning as the students discover and explore a variety of nonfiction texts and produce unique works within the nonfiction genre. Through the unit, students will continue practicing the fundamentals of English, reinforcing SOL and SAT test taking strategies, and collaborating for a common goal. From 6 word memoirs, impromptu debates and persuasive letters, this lesson does it all with the student as the creator after understanding the concepts. As a goal of nonfiction is to entertain while informing, there is nothing more powerful than providing students with tools to share their voice at such a pivotal age.
This specific part of the unit focuses on the importance of proper use of social networking and media: an increasing tool used to share information for the 21st century student. Students will respond to a scenario, create proper guidelines and expectations for their generation, and produce a class “Wordle” to share their information with the community.

Submitted by: Allison Maupin
School: Varina High School

Summary

The students were given an assignment to write a bill about something they wanted changed or improved at school. The students were to write their bill just as a bill that would go to Congress would be presented. As the students finished their bills, my 3rd block became the House of Representatives, and my 7th block became the Senate. Each block was then divided into committees based on the topics of their bills (safety, school lunches, senior privileges, etc.) and the bills from 3rd went to 7th and vice versa. The students uploaded their bills into Google Docs and dragged them into the correct folder for the committees. Then, each house broke into committees and began to analyze their bills. They read the bills, commented on them, and changed them within Google Docs. Once the committees were done looking at bills, they presented to the class which bills they thought were most effective. The students then voted on bills through ActivEngage. At this point, the bills that passed with correct percentages, were sent to the other house of Congress. The next class, the same process took place except all students looked at the bills, they were debated on the floor and voted on again with ActivEngage. The bills that passed with correct percentages were sent to the instructor who played the role of president and could veto bills. The final bills that were chosen were given to the principal with hopes the changes could actually be made around the school.

Submitted by: Allison Maupin
Collaborators:School Librarians
School: Varina High School

Summary

Students are divided into campaign teams with each holding a specific position on the team (Campaign Manager, Media Advisor,Finance Manager, Speech Writer, Manager of Volunteers, etc.) and will produce all components of what an actual campaign team would do during an election. Each member is responsible for creating all individual portions that their campaign position requires. Collectively, as a group, the students will create a campaign commercial focusing on a specific strategy learned from a campaign commercial analysis. The commercials were shown to a different Government class who voted for the winning candidate and campaign team. The project information is given to students at the beginning of the elections unit, so as content is learned, the students can take notes for their specific position. For example, the Media Advisor is responsible for editing the campaign commercial using MovieMaker, creating a Facebook page for their candidate using a Word Document Template, a newspaper advertisement (some used Publisher), and a radio advertisement (some used MP3 files). Each student is graded not only on the work that present individually, but they are also given a group grade, and the students grade their peers on their work ethic.

Submitted by: JaNee Jones & Sarah Billups
Collaborators:School Librarians
School: Varina High School

Summary

The objective of the “Can you hear me now?” unit is to provide students with the tools to effectively and powerfully express themselves. This creative and informational unit will develop student centered learning as the students discover and explore a variety of nonfiction texts and produce unique works within the nonfiction genre. Through the unit, students will continue practicing the fundamentals of English, reinforcing SOL and SAT test taking strategies, and collaborating for a common goal. From 6 word memoirs, impromptu debates and persuasive letters, this lesson does it all with the student as the creator after understanding the concepts. As a goal of nonfiction is to entertain while informing, there is nothing more powerful than providing students with tools to share their voice at such a pivotal age.
This specific part of the unit focuses on independent, collaborative, and creative research and critical thinking. Students are challenged with developing a “How to Video” to teach their peers a skill that is pertinent to their generation. It extends beyond the simplicity of “How to walk,” as students create age-appropriate, high-interest, and audience focused videos, which requires advanced research skills, creative questioning, communication, and complete interest in a topic.

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: JaNee Jones & Sarah Billups
School: Varina High School

Summary

The objective of the “Can you hear me now?” unit is to provide students with the tools to effectively and powerfully express themselves. This creative and informational unit will develop student centered learning as the students discover and explore a variety of nonfiction texts and produce unique works within the nonfiction genre. Through the unit, students will continue practicing the fundamentals of English, reinforcing SOL and SAT test taking strategies, and collaborating for a common goal. From 6 word memoirs, impromptu debates and persuasive letters, this lesson does it all with the student as the creator after understanding the concepts. As a goal of nonfiction is to entertain while informing, there is nothing more powerful than providing students with tools to share their voice at such a pivotal age. This specific part of the unit focuses on using strict parameters to construct memoirs: personal experience nonfiction narratives. Through limitations of the 6 word memoir format, students get inspired, create, and digitally share a literary “snap shot” into their lives. Students enjoy the “Twitter” like aspects of the lesson along with the creation of a class culture through just 6 words.

Submitted by: Kathryn Brock
School: Varina High School

Summary

Students learned about how emission spectra are created (electrons absorbing energy and then releasing it as light, with frequency/wavelength of the light determined by how much energy was released) and used prior knowledge of electron configurations and their pattern on the periodic table. In this lesson, students observed complete emission spectra for most of the elements of the periodic table and formulated their own ideas about trends in emission spectra that might occur across periods and down groups on the periodic table, and correspond to electron configuration. Students proposed hypotheses to address their analysis. Then students compiled class data, incorporated it into a graphic presentation, and reviewed the trends they proposed.

Submitted by: Dana Dabney
School: Varina High School

Summary

This lesson is based on the topic of masks and how they have affected our lives in the past and the present day. In a group, students chose some sort of mask that they are interested in and research the topic further. They share their found information via a Prezi presentation that is then shared on our class blog. After learning about many different aspects of masks and mask making by reading other class’ blog posts, student then create their own original clay mask in the classroom.