Making the Elections Relevant

As this year's Elections draw closer and closer do your students really know what is going on?

With all of the ads on TV, radio and the internet it may be difficult for your students to see the big picture as you explain the election process to them.

Although this can be discussed in all grade levels it is more prevalent right now for students that are in the eighth grade. How might you ask?

Students in the eighth grade are currently learning about the Revolutionary War and the events that happened immediately afterwards. Those events helped to lead us to our first Presidential election. Again you may be asking why is this an important event in the lives of these students. The answer is simple, during the next elections cycle they will be High School Seniors and may have the opportunity to vote. So it is important for them to understand the process and how they can make a difference if they choose to vote, remembering to tell them that it is their choice.

Here are some resources that can help make the difference in how your students perceive the Elections and how they can get involved and make it relevant to their lives.

• Have your students create Political Cartoons using this Arts Edge Lesson that brings in a cross curricular component to the normal Social Studies curriculum.  As well Arts Edge has a great Lesson on the Election Process to help enhance your instruction on how the process works.
•  You can use Read Write Think as a launch point to provide a number of resources on the Election Cycle and ways to get your students involved.  Some of these resources discuss using Avatars to create political cartoon skits.
• You can use this Themed Resource page from Smithsonian's History Explorer to give your students some more background on the election process.  See how Mass Media plays a role in the election process with this resource from Smithsonian. 
• Try all of these resources that Thinkfinity has gathered together for you regarding the election process.
• Here are a lot of Election Lesson plans and activities from EDSITEment that go along with the Social Studies curriculum.

So even though I am talking to all you eighth grade teachers out there, anyone can utilize these resources to help make the elections relevant to your students by having them become involved through some of these activities.

This will help drive home the importance of the subject material and even help them to understand the current events that are going on in the world around them.


photo credit: The Suss-Man (Mike) via photopin cc

More Election Connections!

This morning Melissa wrote a blog post about Let's help students make connections with elections! This reminded me of some more election resources, but through Edmodo. When you are in Edmodo, there are several election communities that you can follow. (Remember you can follow any of these publisher communities in Edmodo by click on the Browse button next to the word Community). In these communities, you can connect with other teachers teaching about the election or find resources on the election. Here are a couple of communities that you might be interested in.

photo credit: Vaguely Artistic via photopin cc

Bill of Rights Institute: There is a video on the history of voting, and teaching with current events. You can sign up for lessons to be mailed to you on current events, voting, free press, the constitution, etc.


Election Insights: Activities for the debates, election, etc. Click on the button Collections for more resources.

iCivics: Constitution resources, branches of government resources, etc. Click on the button Collections for more resources and games.

Edmodo has some ideas for teaching the election: 3 Ways to Engage Students through Edmodo.


Image from PhotoPin: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaguelyartistic/61275039/

Let's help students make connections with the elections!

Do you know how many days it is from today until the Presidential Election?

Do our children understand the signs, commercials and debates they are seeing and hearing?

I found something on the Library of Congress site that could help:

This image is not interactive but if you click on it, you will be taken to the interactive site where it is from!

At the site, when you hover on the words at the side, blue questions appear above the voting box (which is animated). Those can be guiding questions for the text you will access when you click on the categories.

I think a KWL or KWLH chart might work well ….

According to ReadingQuest Strategies:

What Is K-W-L?.
K-W-L is the creation of Donna Ogle and is a 3-column chart that helps capture the Before, During, and After components of reading a text selection.

K stands for Know
This is the prior knowledge activation question. 

W stands for Will or Want
What do I think I will learn about this topic?
What do I want to know about this topic?

L stands for Learned
What have I learned about this topic?

Asking questions can engage and inspire learning! It also provides direction for what you want children to learn from a resource. I have written a previous post on KWL charts and also one on FQR charts which may work even better for nonfiction … Facts, Questions, and Responses.

These nonfiction information articles provide a place for guided practice on this type of text as well as what to do when you encounter words that you do not know when you read.

Another idea is for children to create posters/signs/lists online or offline of the interesting information the discover. You could even jigsaw this site by having different groups read each section and then report back to the other about what they learned. This could be a time for students to choose how to represent the information to share it!

Here are places you can find nonfiction reading strategies and lessons that could be used with the material you find on the Library of Congress site:

• Class Tables of Non-Fiction Features and Text Structures
• Look in the Literacy Cookbook for Recipes for Effective Literacy Instruction
• Reading Nonfiction Texts Lessons from NCTE 

You never know what you might learn from reading nonfiction!

Did you know that George Washington was reluctant to become our first president?

Election Season is Quickly Approaching

Election Season is quickly approaching and this season promises to be another scorcher!  You can sense it in the air and on TV.  One politician is going to save the world while sharing that their opponent is ready to destroy the world.  Yes it appears this is going to be a hot one that's expected to last until at least November.

Elections and politics can be an overwhelming and difficult subject to follow but luckily there are teachers out there to help us make sense of it all.  I was at West Forsyth High School a teacher shared with me many of her go to websites to help students find the truths behind politics and the political arena.

Below are her websites with a brief explanation of what they might be used for.


Often times people can tell a lot about a politician by the support they receive in election season. 

http://www.opensecrets.org/ is a great website that lets you explore who is funding the presidential and congressional candidates.  This website will be a great resource for students to back their arguments and leads to great discussion on how candidates vote while in office.  This website has data on fundraising amounts by candidates as well as their largest PAC supporters.

Many promises are made in election season.  One of my favorite websites is http://www.politifact.com/ .  Politifacts is a website that helps citizens follow a politician or idea (i.e. healthcare) and find the truths behind the claims made and the reality of those claims.  Politifacts is chocked full of information to help your students discern between what political ads claim and what is really happening.

During election season students may wonder where they stand compared to other Americans on certain issues.  Polls are a great way to determine this.  http://www.pollingreport.com/ is a great website that collects many polls and puts them on one website.  Polls from CNN, AP, Wall Street Journal and the PEW Research Center are just a few that this collection has to offer.  The homepage offers polls anywhere from the President and Congress to National Security and Issues that are recently trending. 

Three other local websites that would be of interest is the NC Democratic Party's website http://www.ncdp.org/ the NC Republican Party's website  www.ncgop.org/ and the Forsyth County Board of Elections website www.co.forsyth.nc.us/Elections/  

With the political season on the horizon I hope these websites offer a few tools to help you weather the storm.

Tweeting to Disaster

I, to make a bad joke, ran across this article this morning about the upcoming 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.  The History Press has launched a new Twitter account to chronicle the days leading up to and including the faithful night that the UN-Sinkable ship sank in the waters of the North Atlantic.

You can follow the timeline through the hashtag #TitanicVoyage (@titanicrealtime), and even from some of the people that were a part of the launch like #crew, #engineering, #captain to hear their thought and accounts of the events that led up to that now infamous night of April 15, 1912. Currently the timeline was setup on March 10, 2012 to begin the chronicling of the events.  There are just a few tweets out there now from the captain, crew, engineering and officer but as the time gets closer to the launch date we should start seeing the timeline fill up.  Currently there are almost 13k followers of the site.

This could be a great lesson starter for you Social Studies classes where the students can follow along with the feed as things are happening to see what it would have been like if Twitter was around during that time for people to be able to send out updates as they were happening.  We find it so often now with other natural disasters that we are getting updates from Tweets faster than we can get news crews into areas.  It will be very interesting to see how things unfold through tweets over the next month.  Maybe to see if there will be tweets coming from what would be passengers as well as the crew for their thoughts on what will, or rather has happened.

** Update **
I just got some new information that I needed to add to this post.  The information that is being Tweeted out is, and will be coming directly from the ships log books.

Are you ready to jump back in time?

Have you seen the Caleb's Creek Media Matters blog?  That is one place that Holly DuBois shares interesting resources as well as book activities she plans to use.

Looking at her blog one day, I came across a resource that I had not heard about before .... so I thought I would share the information with you too!

Here is a part of the blog post Jump Back in Time:

Using the America's Story section of the Library of Congress resource, you can click into the Jump Back in Time feature. (I have talked about other parts of America's Story before here and here if you are interested and missed them.) Using the Jump Back in Time feature, there are a lot of neat things you can do. Of course, the main part included links to all the major historical eras of the United States, broken down into sections from 1492 to present day. Each era link will take you to information along with many links to other stories related to the same time period. I like the way this is done because you can see history as a string of many stories that fit together rather than a bland history book paragraph listing the things that happened.

There is also a Fact or Myth question when you are on the main page with a different question each time you visit the page. It explains why it is a fact or myth. You can also choose a date to visit to see important things from that day. It suggests using your birthday, but this could also be fun to do each day to see what happened that day. You could also do the Fact or Myth question and use both as an opener to the day or something for those last few minutes after you pack up at the end of the day. The Super Sleuth game is fun but short. Famous photos of historical people have had something added to them that doesn't fit the time period and students have to find it.

This is a great place to start with introducing a time period, giving context to an era a book might be set in, or just for the history buffs!

I can see some great Social Studies and History connections for this resource from the Library of Congress. This would probably be a good place to find some nonfiction reading material.

I encourage you to look at Caleb's Creek Media Matters ....

We enjoy highlighting posts and/or blogs in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School System .... if you have any to share, just let us know!

We also like to share where we learned new things, so the next time you learn something new and/or interesting, let us know and hopefully we can share it too!

Animals, Animals, Animals

At one of my schools, they are getting ready to do a big animal unit study and asked for some resources. I thought I would share some of my favorite ones here in the blog.

National Geographic is a really good web site.  On the right hand side of the web page you see animals and they are in alphabetical order. You can also search for an animal in the search box. When you click on an animal (I clicked on the Bengal Tiger), there is a picture of the animal, information about that animal, you can hear how the animal sounds, there is a map of their range, and quick facts on the animal. Very useful for a students to learn about the different animals.

I like National Geographic for Kids for younger kids. It seems more kid-friendly. You can view videos or pictures of animals. I clicked on Mammals in the left hand side of the screen, and then clicked on Gray Wolves. Here you can read about the wolves, view pictures and hear them howling. There is also a map that shows where they live.

While I was searching for animal web sites, I came across one that I had never seen before. It has become one of my favorites. This site is called ARKive. They have information on endangered species, you can search animals, plants, etc. If you click on Explore ARKive, a drop down menu appears and you can click on any of the Species Groups, Eco-Regions, etc. There are some great videos of the animals that you can show to students. Check out one of these videos about Giant Pandas. If you are studying marine animals, I encourage you to click on Google Earth (in the drop down menu) to view endangered marine species and where they live.

Please make sure to view the terms of use to see if students/teachers can print anything from these sites.

Image: 'Eyes of the tiger' http://www.flickr.com/photos/25182307@N00/1380828408

Image: 'The Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center' http://www.flickr.com/photos/36244273@N00/221043235

Using EDU Glogster in the Social Studies Classroom

I had a workshop a week ago for some Social Studies teachers. They wanted to know how they could use EDU Glogster in their class with students. They also wanted to know why they would want to use EDU Glogster in their classroom.

So, I created a glog on Using Glogster in Social Studies. The workshop went well. We talked about ways to use EDU Glogster and I showed some examples of how other people have used it in their social studies classroom. One of the ways I use EDU Glogster is as a teaching tool. I usually show my glog to workshop participants and teach from the glog. EDU Glogster is a great introduction to a lesson also.

In the Department of Instructional Technology, we are creating "About Us" glogs to post to our department's web page and on our department's blog.

North Carolina History ... a digital version

Having lived in NC most of my life and having taught 4th grade Social Studies for 7 years, anything related to NC History captures my attention. I have found many excellent resources on LearnNC previously, so when I saw something on Twitter about LearnNC and a digital textbook, I was intrigued. The North Carolina History Digital Textbook provides "primary sources, multimedia, readings, and lesson plans to tell the many stories of North Carolina's past." Part of the subtitle says, "Replace your textbook — or enhance your teaching with selections." That part about replacing a textbook made me think of my first year teaching 4th grade Social Studies. We were talking about the lighthouses on the Outer Banks of NC. There was one paragraph that talked about how the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse needed to be moved so it would not erode away. Well, the lighthouse was moved a few years before I taught that lesson. With a digital textbook, that information could have been easily updated and even linked to the movie or animation showing the moving process. Think of all the ways that one story (moment in history) could be enriched (and students engaged) using multimedia.
Even though I am not currently in a classroom, I have so many ideas about the ways I could use this North Carolina History Digital Textbook to teach various Social Studies and Reading Skills. Even though this book is designed for 8th grade, think about the skills related to timelines, historical images, landforms, history, nonfiction text, as well as maps and diagrams that could be based on this type of textbook even for younger students.

image from http://www.learnnc.org/nchistory/

RemixAmerica.org

Recently I have been interested in two ideas: promoting the types of digital media students can create and share as well as the concept that we are in a “remix” society. I stumbled a across a site trying to address both within the framework of U.S. History.

RemixAmerica.org is a site that describes itself as being a "nonpartisan, nonprofit in-browser editing tool that allows citizens around the country to remix the great words and speeches of American History with the hot button issues of today.” Additional language on the site surrounds the idea of creating a platform for ideas, discussions, and public expression.

The result seems to be a lot of videos clips that pull together various media to tell a story, or represent an idea housed on the site where users can view and comment in a manner similar to youtube or teachertube. The site appears to be focused on both past U.S history as well as current events. Like any site that contains user-created content, some of it is very good (I watched a remix titled “Civil Rights 09” which was very well-done) while a lot of it is not. It will be interesting to see if this site will become a real resource for discussing history or a battleground for users to just create negative videos about those who don’t share their views and politics. The site appears to be relatively new—the oldest remix video I saw was from May of last year, but someone is uploading material daily (10 videos between 7:30 and 1:30 today), and much of it looks like student work.

And although I didn’t encounter anything vulgar or profane, I’m sure there is the risk. But there appears to be a system for reporting objectionable content, and with an option to download videos you choose, it appears there is a way to avoid some unwanted content. Besides, there are subjects in history and politics that may not be appropriate for every classroom.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting this is a site to start using right away with students, but I’m interested in its possibilities. And I’m in support of projects that have students engage in creating media and provoke discussions and feedback with a broad audience—andRemixAmerica.org has the potential to be a tool to do just that.

It Takes a Community

Bobby Hobgood from Learn NC conducted a session at the NCaect conference about culturally responsive teaching. The suggested resources focused on meeting the needs of Latino students but the real key to creating a culture for learning is to realize we all bring our own history and our own perspective into the classroom. Teachers are challenged to blend all represented cultures to create a community of learners. A framework for creating this shared culture stresses the importance of:
Establishing inclusion - make sure everyone feels respected and connected
Developing a positive attitude toward learning - make it relevant and offer choices, build real world connections and my world connections
Enhance meaning - lesson has to matter to the learner
Engender competence - students have to believe they can be effective learners

Suggested resources from Learn NC included:
Helping Latino Students Feel Comfortable in your Classroom http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/latinosclassman2006-01

Climbing the school ladder: A challenging task for migrant Latino students http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/brdglangbarriers/1.1

Reaching Latinos through Social Studies
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/latinossocialstudies

It is okay to be different: Teaching diversity with Todd Parr http://www.learnnc.org/lessons/Readwritethink200606212024

Bridging Language Barriers
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/brdglangbarriers/1.3

Funds of Knowledge
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/brdglangbarriers/2.1

Don't put it down, put it up
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/harwell-braun1

InTime Multicultural Education
http://www.learnnc.org/bestweb/intime