Student Topic Choice Intake

It seems like this assignment pops up in many forms at the beginning of the school year. I have been playing around with this as a way to teach students how to use google earth in a way  that allows them to focus on learning the software without having to worry about learning new conten

Objectives

Working in google earth students will:

• Students will learn how to create place markers
  
• Students will learn how to insert hyperlinks into place markers
• Students will learn how to save .kmz files
  

In order to do these things students will already need to be able to navigate in google earth and use the search bar to find locations. It is also helpful if they can turn on an off layers. In my mind students need a day to play with the software and a day to do the work.

Sample: Summer Vacation

Process:

Students will choose 5 locations that they visited this summer. For each location they will create a place marker with a short description of the place. They need to include at least 3 hyperlinks for the project. Each place marker description does not need a hyperlink. As an extension students can use html tags to embed the link into the text.

The more I teach the more I am convinced that students would benefit across content from being exposed  to some basic philosophy. It came up today in class when students were very critical of a dramatic production that was part of an all school assembly.

The play was deemed, by a few students, to be “unrealistic”. I asked how they came to believe this and the basic answer seemed to be that because they (as individuals or a small group) had not experienced the scenario in the play that it must not be realistic. In some sense they were arguing that if they have not experienced something or conceived of something that it is not real.

I pushed them on this a bit and asked them to write down a response to the following quesiton:

How do you know what you believe is true?

Most students answered along the lines of – “I believe something is true when I have evidence for it, I have seen it or someone I trust tells me it is true.” A few others gestured toward the idea of coherence by pointing out that they tended to believe things that fit with other things that they believed. I then asked them to write a response to:

How do you know the things you sense are true?

The period ended before we could talk about this. I am curious to see what we arrive at tomorrow. I do want to present them with a short section of Descartes.

Here it is:  the-declaration-in-action

Here is the project we will be working on over the next two days in the computer lab. All students must complete level one.

American Government
Open this document and  save it to your home folder. All the links you will need for this project are contained in this document. Few people will reach level 6. Your goal should be to complete as much of the work as possible.

Here are links to the individual components of the work

• 1

• 2

• 3

• 4

• 5

• 6

Here is a recording of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. We will be studying this speech later in the year. I will update this post with more links as we approach the project.

• The Gettysburg Address

Here are your CBA research forms:

• Cba Internet Research-1

• Cba Internet Research-2

Here are your Research Links:

• Eckstein Library

• Delicious (Research Links)

• Easy Bibliography Tool

Here are some links that might be useful for your CBA:

• CBA Planning Guide

CBA Planning Guide 2

Preliminary Research Guide

• Introduction to Historical Options

Click on the link below to see a tutorial on how to create citations using Easy Bibliography tool. This will open as a Windows Media Player file.

• Easy Bibliography-Tool

One of our department goals this year is to move toward a more aligned Seventh grade humanities curriculum. An important part of this process it the 2008 Presidential Election Persuasive Writing project. All Seventh graders will complete a project that involves the analysis, documentation and citation of a variety of source dealing with this years national Election. These sources will be used to write a persuasive paper dealing with a candidate or election issue. This project will run through the first quarter and be completed on November 3, the day before the general election.