Glogster

Here is my first glog! I couldn't quite figure out how to embed it on this page, but it can be accessed here.

Let me know what you think!

Service learning ideas

Here is a link to my notes taken the last class. The following are my classmates ideas for service learning based on their presentations from last week:

Chance: Calls to congress, letters. getting them involved in government
Adam: Voter registration, community outreach
Megan: Human trafficking, spreading awareness, modern day abolitionists? current legislation to stop it. Blue heart facebook pic to raise awareness.
Jen: military letter writing drive.
Josh: Honoring veterens, November 11th, interview one veteran for 30 minutes about their service, blog about their experience participating , others can learn by reading
Jeremy: War on drugs, similar to DARE but less one-sided
Megan: Connecting students with specific soldiers from the community; more than writing letters to them; film a video about their progress and upload to the website. present a weekly question about what they learn about technology or their soldier. Good way to keep them aware of geography and intl events.
Liz H: operation Christmas boxes, christmas for children less fortunate, interview and blog about their experiences
Eric: lives of the elderly- elderly participate in research project. encourage them to email their family. do a questionaire 1 month later to see if they make a difference.
elizabeth j - global awareness; help students understand immigration; focus on the culture and language of a certain country to create a wiki
Mallory - habitat for humanity to determine cost of houses; research cost effectiveness; inverview habitat people, help students learn about homlessness and urban economics
louisa- senior oral histories. "5 things they couldn't live without" - then create a vodcast. vodcast viewing party at the home. make them feel good about their experiences.
Mark- political class wiki, biographical sketch of local politician that they interview posted on the wiki. use clipart if students do not want to draw their own.
Katie- visits and interviews with the elderly
Jeff - groups of kids pick up local parks and public places. wildlife conservation and environmental awareness, make a video of them at the park
Megan P- reseraching past presidential election trends, differences in media roles at those times, role of government in daily life over time, interview seniors about past elections, have them create a podcast
brit - voter turnout exercise, use surveymonkey to creating a questionaire about public opinions, makes them aware of election issues and teaches about data collection and interperetation
Nicole - students learn about voting and campaigning. They will have their own campaign. Use google motion to find trends in past elections. They will have polling questions of their own to create a motion chart.
Angie - Students learn about their individual rights. They select a topic concerning them and they will research their topic, determine current value, then publish their findings on a wiki.
Trish - at risk students making pen pals in Japan. letter exchange will expand cultural horizons and global citizenship. Help teach them about bias and they can exchange information about their dialy lives. possibly exchange packages. Create a wiki about their experience. They would right a paper talking about any issues they had.

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Our Community from Long Ago
Civic Responsibility, Community Service
Grades 8-10
American History
Goals:
1) This lesson aims to make students more aware of the history that exists in the place they are growing up.
2) It seeks to help the elderly within the community by giving them a sense of pride about their past experiences.
3) It gets students more comfortable with using technology to create a piece they can be proud of and learn from. This piece will be a collaboration of primary sources that can be studied by later generations.
4) Give students an appreciation for senior citizens and the stories they have to tell.

In order to get students aware of their local history, they will conduct interviews with seniors from their community to get a firsthand account of the past. Every day, seniors pass away in isolation taking with them countless untold stories and experiences. Unfortunately, our society allows such treatment to our elders. This lesson plan aims to teach students that our seniors are good people and are part of the community, too. They have many stories to tell that can help students gain a better understanding of their identity at such a crucial time. To achieve this, students will interview three different people from a retirement or nursing home in their community. Because they are using multiple participants, the service to the community will be increased. At the same time, students can hear multiple stories told from different points of view. They may work in pairs. The topic must focus must focus on daily life of the subject from the time they were the approximate age of the interviewer. It should include a discussion about cultural values and societal norms of the time. This is to help them understand that the city they live in now was a much different place 65 to 75 years ago. They must record each interview using Garage Band or some other recording program. Using these recordings, combined with images of their choosing, students will create a digital storytelling project to illustrate what they have learned in their interviews.

Standards met by the project:
SS.8.A.1.4
SS.8.A.1.6
NETS addressed:
1.Creativity and Innovation (B)
2.Communication and Collaboration (A & B)
3.Research and Information Fluency (A & B)
4.Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making (B)
5.Digital Citizenship (A & B)
6.Technology Operations (A – D)

Students will use a recording program, preferably GarageBand, to record their interviews with senior citizens. Using portions of each audio file, combined with images relevant to the interview, students will create a digital storytelling presentation using iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. Narration from the students is also an important part of the project, as it will assist in transitioning from subject to subject.
Students will be graded based on the completion of their interviews, and will be assessed on the thoughtfulness and relevancy of their presentation. The final product should give viewers an insight into the history of the community. It must be between 5 and 10 minutes long, and contain sound clips from all three of their interview subjects. In order to have the project evaluated each student or group of students must email the instructor a link from www.youtube.com showing their presentation on the website. If they are not registered, they must do so. Overall, they will be graded on their ability to tell stories about people and places within their community from many years ago.

~MjG

How social networking could have changed Civil Rights

TED Talk lecturer Clay Shirkey made some very good points about technological innovation. Social Networking connects people like no other invention in the history of the world. Now that it exists, it already impacts alters the way news breaks everyday. Imagine how it could have changed history if it was invented instead of the television.

When I think about social networking in the historical sense, I think of social movements. People are able to connect and organize without any fear of repercussion from the government or anyone else. That is why I wish social networking would have been around when segregation was present in the South . Civil rights violations boiled over and became a movement in the 1950s-1960's, but everything was organized by telephone and by meeting in local churches. Twitter and other social networks like MySpace could have connected people being treated unfairly and wanted to come together and protest social injustice.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott could have been seamlessly organized by connecting people trying to solve a common problem. Facebook could have been used to create a group for other activists to join. They would then use social connections to set up rides for people who have to get to work without using the bus system. Restaurant boycotts could be coordinated to make sure everyone is concentrating on the same goal. They could also communicate on how effective their protests have been in their area. Instead of people being afraid of being the first to come out of their homes to organize and march, everyone would know how many others are part of the movement. It could all happen without anyone leaving their homes.

As a historian, I can't assume that things would work out so easily. On the other side, Americans could have used social networking to connect with others from the status quo, using it to find others who share in the idea of preventing civil rights for all Americans. Conflicts could have been worse because Southerners would have been able to easily find out the time and place of major protests, and therefore been more organized themselves.

I would like to think that African-Americans could have used social networking to organize an effective non-violent protest, but would there have been an equal or not greater resistance using the same technology? How do you think it would have been resolved?

~MjG

Identity and Social Networking

Michael Wesch's video about the sociology of the YouTube community is very interesting. He presents YouTube as a means of expressing individuality. It can be recorded alone, but millions of people could potentially see it. This matters because it is a relatively new way of contributing to an online community. There are no parameters to how this is done, so the sky is the limit when it comes to personal expression. He points out that in our rapidly growing world, people need a way of standing out and shaping their identity.
Social Networking websites provide a way of expressing this identity, too. The "self" becomes what is on personal webpages like Myspace and Facebook. People list what makes them unique or what makes them who they are. People can stand out more online than they can in the real world sometimes, so it is important that the means exist for them to do so.
The same principle exists in the classroom. Students who are quiet or do not want to stand out, despite their intelligence, can do so online. They may be more active and expressive on a website like Ning, for example. These students might be more willing to communicate with the Ning leader at home rather than in class. If this is the case, students who's education suffered previously because they are an "outsider" will be more active with their work.
I have always known the implications of Facebook and the younger generation, but it is definitely a refresher on the emerging importance of social networking. As these websites gain more members every day, they will gain influence over daily life too. I look at Youtube differently with respect to how it impacts future social networking ideas.

There are many social networking websites out there. Facebook, Myspace and Youtube are all young in the grand scheme of things. How do you see social networking changing over the next few years? Will it always be a picture with a page? If you see it as being relatively unchanged, is that really a bad thing?

~MjG

Podcasts and history: Only a piece of the puzzle

Lindsey and I explored ItunesU for resources to teach the Holocaust to our students. It had several things to offer, but we finally settled on the first-person narration of the horrors that occured in the camps. While we think it is interesting and powerful to listen to, its not entirely interactive. There are ways to combine these podcasts and other similar resources to teach the unit to secondary students.


One incorrect, yet established belief is that the murder of over six million jews during WWII never occurred.There are different motivations as to why this belief exists, but as teachers we can use this for a lesson on the Holocaust. I found a website on this subject called the Holocaust Denial On Trial (http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/en/). This website hosts a multitude of content that refutes these claims, including arguments and counter arguments from noted Holocaust deniers.

One way of using this resource as a lesson is to have the students put denial claims on trial for themselves. As we plan the lesson, we can create obstacles for the students to overcome, such as giving them arguments and evidence from Holocaust deniers. This website (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/denial1.html) has a list of many different questions (with answers) that we can pose to the students. It will be up to them to use the HDOT website to find evidence and make their case that the Holocaust did exist. Another possible obstacle would be that they must present a wide variety of evidence, such as court documents, photos, podcasts, videos, or anything else they can find. The students will have to create a document that includes all of their arguments and presentation of their evidence.

I think this is one way of having students actively investigate the truth vs myth in history. They will learn a lot in the process because their is so much media that exists on this subject.

~MjG