Beijing Tour Company – 4282

Summary

In this cross-curricular lesson, students were given the authentic task: “You are travel agents for Beijing Tour Company. Your goal is to persuade potential tourists to travel to China. Most tourists want to see the historic sites that China has to offer. In order to meet the various wants of your tourists, you need to become an expert in Ancient Chinese culture. To do this, you will need to create questions that your tourists might want to know about their trip and research these questions. You will then create an advertisement to persuade tourists to use your tour company: Beijing Tour Company. Your advertisement may be print, video, or a virtual tour.” Students were given a choice of technology tools: Comic Life, Photo Booth, or Google Earth, to create their advertisement.

TIPC Ratings

This lesson is Ideal/Target in Research and Information Fluency. The students were presented with an authentic task and generated their own questions and conducted research to obtain answers. They utilized the information they found to develop a persuasive appeal to get tourists to visit China.

This lesson is lower Approaching in Communication and Collaboration. The teacher designed a challenge that promoted student collaboration to address an authentic task without direct supervision. Students were able to select their groups and worked together on a shared computer to research and create a new product. Students reflected on their roles in their groups and set goals for future experiences. In order to increase the communication, the products could be shared on a blog with other classes and/or students could collaborate with a professional, expert, or class outside of the school for research on this topic.

This lesson is Ideal/Target in Critical Thinking and Problem Solving. Students were asked to research and then create a persuasive appeal for tourists to visit Beijing, China. Students had to develop questions and use this information to create an advertisement using one of these tools: Comic Life, Photo Booth, or Google Earth. Students had to determine which tool would best fit with how they wanted to market their tour company. Students were asked to explain their choices and the problem solving techniques they employed as they completed the task.

This lesson is Ideal/Target in Creativity and Innovation. Students were given three choices for their advertisement: print, video, or a virtual tour using Comic Life, PhotoBooth, or Google Earth, respectively. Students then created an advertisement based on the authentic task using the information they had researched. Group products varied and reflected each group’s decisions and risk taking. Students were asked to reflect upon their work and set goals for the future.