Project ideas

1. Lowering the drinking age
2. Decriminalizing marijuana
3. Fingerprinting students for use in schools - lunch, book check out, fines, etc
4. Uniforms in schools
5. Curfew laws
6. Religion in schools
7. Off campus Lunch
8. Creationism vs. Evolution being taught in schools
9. Use of technology in the classroom (or lack there of)
Should students be allowed to use their phones during class?
Should teachers send tests to thier students phones?
Does background music improve learning?
10. Healthcare - private personal coverage vs. global governmental coverage
11. Immigration - various issues abound here

Students should be allowed to generate their own topics with approval of instructor and it be in the boundaries of a policital issue with statistical persuasions either for or against the position.

Continuing the project

Here's the latest thoughts on continuing the project. We have a time line of before Christmas break. This week til Thursday Ms. Bucher is doing and introduction to research and what is a source. Thursday and Friday Ms. Enoch and I will show and have the students select their political topic to do research on. We'll divide time up among the three of us for research on from December 3 to the 12th and from the 13th to the 19th have them create their multimedia final project of a commercial, PowerPoint (type) presentation or short film. With student presentations on the 20th and the 21st.

10 math questions

So I'm trying to use an idea from a book by Lynne Kelly called "Challenging Minds." The idea is to have students answer questions that may or may not have answers in traditional resource places. The example they use is "What is an Apgar test?" the problem with the question is that I found an answer on google, which I believe is the primary resource for most people; however,the idea is that if a student had asked their mom or a recent mother they would be able to explain what a Apgar Test is. So for an introduction to the research/persuasion project we thought it would be best to find 10 questions each for Civics, Statistics, and Persuasion. I'll post comments for some of my ideas.

Adding on to the unit project

So the idea comes in that we need to help our students become better at projects, not only the resources to look at how to manage their time. I've collaborated with my team (Tonya and Patti Jo) about how we can work together to support eachother. So we reconfigured another project for GT kids. We're going to ask 20 or so questions from our respective fields and have the kids take the questions home to murr over (most probably set aside) then have them complete research with text sources only for one day and finally two days for internet research. The idea is that they realize that books and the internet are not their only resources for information. People too have knowledge and they are often the best resource we can find and trust.

End of term 1

So I had lots of great ideas and no time to implement. So here's my thought: term 2 work collaboratively with my team and create a team project in which we all have differing assignments/goals based upon the student position on a political idea or opinion. So I can keep track myself here are some possible ideas

1. Lowering the drinking age
2. Decriminalizing marijuana
3. Fingerprinting students for use in schools - lunch, book check out, fines, etc
4. Uniforms in schools
5. Curfew laws

Ideally a webquest can be set up for the students to explore these ideas and pick groups for themselves to work on a project that either supports or arguees against the statistics, the article or the claim itself. From there, I'd like to employ the use of Zoomerang and have the kids create a survey to see if the other students as a whole either agree or disagree with the claim.