Good morning everyone!
Election years always offer great learning opporunties across the curriculum. Some sites, like eLECTIONS by PBS, offer complete, self-contained, ready-to-use educational experiences. Most teachers, however, are left to their own devices in terms of designing lessons. Fortunately, the explosion of information on the Internet means it’s easier than ever to do just that. Between the vast quantities of digital information freely available on the web, and the wide variety of tools to help us organize it all, this election year promises to be one of the most informative ever.
Helping in that regard is Googlitics: A Study of Politics for the Digital Generation, the brainchild of Cheryl Davis from Acalanes Union High School District and Kathleen Ferenz of CTAP IV:
Cheryl and Kathleen built Googlitics to show how Google tools can help promote understanding of and participation in the political process. Created entirely using Google Sites, Googlitics presents lesson ideas, cool Google widgets, links to resources, civic participation ideas and more. If you and your students are using Google Tools in your district, you’ll REALLY love this site, as it does a terrific job of leveraging Google resources and will give you many ideas for projects with your students. Even if you aren’t, you’ll still appreciate the vast collection of timely and rich, multimedia resources made available. Thanks, Cheryl and Kathleen for this terrific resource!
Hope this helps,
-kj-
KJ
Don’t know if you caught my post on PBS Media Infusion this month. I talked about all kind of resources but don’t have either of these…googlelitics or eLections….At the end I asked readers to leave other ideas…I hope you’ll take a read and link back so that teachers can have these resources as well
KH
Hi Kristin! I’d be happy to. What’s the URL? The link in your post didn’t come through correctly!
Oh, WOW! Folks, if you like my post, you will LOVE Kristin’s over at PBS Media Infusion! Click here:
http://tinyurl.com/6od57a
“In 2004, MySpace was one year old, Facebook had just launched, and YouTube didn’t exist. For the 2008 election, all of the candidates have accounts on these and many other social networking sites.”
It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come with social media since the last election. Truly a great post by Kristin!
-kj-