Check out Mrs. Neary's Election Headquarters wiki. This project on Political Issues grouped students into political parties with each party member having roles and task to perform. This project used the wikispace for a project based learning activity.
This project had the 3most important ingredients to a project bsed lesson: Rigor, Relevance, and Substantive Conversation(great discussions among the teacher and class, among students within their political parties, major concepts and social studies standards brought forth by teacher,Mrs. Neary, inclusion teacher, John chernewski, and co-teacher and CFF coach, Stan Shumski.
Civics and Government
5.2.12.A: Evaluate an individual's civil rights, responsibilities and obligations in various contemporary governments
5.2.12.B: Examine the causes of conflicts in society and evaluate techniques to address those conflicts.
5.2.12.C: Evaluate political leadership and public service in a republican form of government.
5.2.12.D: Evaluate and demonstrate what makes competent and responsible citizens.
5.3.12.D: Evaluate the roles of political parties, interest groups, and mass media in politics and public policy
5.3.12.E: Evaluate the fairness and effectiveness of the United States electoral processes, including the electoral college.
5.1.12.C: Evaluate the application of the principles and ideals in contemporary civic life.
· Liberty / Freedom
· Democracy
· Justice
· Equality
This project had elements of many web 2.0 tools:
Wikspaces - embedding text, videos, and pictures
Photostory 3 for making Political Ads.
Microsoft publisher for creating brochures, newspaper clippings, Then converting the MP doc into a picture using pdf converter and saving as a picture to be embedded into the wiki page.
Voki - Avitars on main page voice recordings
Podcast with directions on main page using podbean.com
Google Docs Spreadsheet for comparing issues. Click on the Party Analysis wikPage
Google Docs forms for making up the election Ballot
CFF Digital Cameras for pictures to be used in the Political Ad Videos
Downloading background Music from free online sites for the Political Ads.
Research - Most important - Using the internet skills to research the political party they were given whether they were for that party or not to develop a campaign Website.
Student Centered - This was a student centered lesson with teacher, inclusion teacher, and tech coach acting as co-researchers, co-producers, co-planners, and tech facilitators.
