Submitted by: Ben Nicely
Collaborators: Hattie Smart, librarian and Greg Metcalf, ITRT
School: Deep Run High School
Summary
This project is part of a continued commitment to build and grow students in 21st century skills, student generated products while blending project based learning and SOLs. Students are to create a web-based collaborative project around the causes of the Civil War (Nullification/State’s Rights vs. Federal Rights, Sectionalism- Cultural and Economic differences, Abolition, Territorial Expansion, and the Election of Lincoln in 1860). Students will be placed into five separate groups and through ingrained practice of 21st century skills throughout the first semester build competencies thereby illustrating retention of content. The end goal is to have US History students showcase web pages with audiovisual content related to the causes of the Civil War and have them develop ideas to prevent the war all while receiving feedback from the teacher and peers on the class blog.
TIPC Ratings
This lesson is target as students selected various web and software tools and multimedia artifacts and created presentations. In teams, students evaluated and chose relevant and accurate resources. Students knew their products would be judged by the teacher and their peers for accuracy.
The lesson is target as students worked in teams (partially formed by teacher with class input) to build their products. They communicated in real and non-real time during the formation process on Google Docs, on the class blog, and spoke to community members while creating original work that was judged by their peers.They communicated via email, text messages, and Google Docs. They rose to the challenge of making original student generated work worthy of blog display. Their projects were shared globally on the web. Peers had to evaluate the projects the week after due date by commenting on the class blog: http:
//deeprunwildcats.org/nicely/?m=201101
This lesson is developing in terms of 21st Century skills. Solving a war that already happened is difficult yet teams of students were able to point out how different paths or choices could have affected outcomes. By expressing and exchanging opinions on what they would have done to prevent certain actions, students demonstrated higher order thinking in responses to open-ended questions. At several stages through the project process they had to reflect and revise their answers and visuals to maximize impact. Such reflection stretched their thinking. Students overcame technical technology obstacles by finding other avenues and resources – often from the web -to achieve the desired goal.
This lesson is target as students produced novel products that offered a different path or point of view regarding issues causing the Civil War. Students created products on US History and the Civil War that could be and were viewed by other students outside of their school . Students wrote lyrics and scripts and created creative and appealing videos on the causes of the Civil War that engaged their peers. Throughout each unit during the semester student created work from YouTube and Vimeo was shown to model the kinds of creativity and innovation desired. Students were challenged to create projects that would not put their peers asleep!
Student Artifact
