4th & 5th Grade/Web 2.0/Fall election activities

Hi,

I'd like to prepare for some short Web 2.0 events based around the election for my 4th & 5th grade students. I teach computer keyboarding and technology and have 30 computers in my room, although the students are only there for 45 minutes at a time.

I feel I could start making plans for my maiden voyage into Web 2.0 by finding some sites and platforms that will be offering some educational material and simple news.

Joanne

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Permalink Reply by Joanne Penn on June 13, 2008 at 11:05pm

Hi Again,

I had my last day of school today. Ahhhh, how wonderful. You probably feel the same as I do. However, when you start to plan your lessons for fall, keep this discussion in mind and come back to it. I'll be checking the web site out throughout the summer, and posting ideas and information that I have.

Joanne

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Permalink Reply by Leigh Newton on June 14, 2008 at 11:25pm

You could set up a wiki that records the students' understanding of the elections. If you teamed up with another school somewhere else in the States (if that's where your school is) you could compare understandings.

Don't forget to mention which your country you're from as this site has members from many nations.

You could get your students communicating on their own Ning, through Skype, and record learning using voices on Evoca.

If you're wanting to list news, I wonder if you could find simple news feeds to add to iGoogle - which allows you make a website using feeds from anywhere.

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Permalink Reply by Dean Mattson on June 15, 2008 at 3:21am

Great suggestions, Leigh, and you're right: There are educators from many countries here. I will share a couple of resources for people who want information about U.S. elections.

Keith Jarrett shared a great resource on his blog the other day: eLections, put together by Cable in the Classroom, that takes students through a simulated election. The big limitation I see with it is that it uses polls and conventional thinking about campaign strategy to calculate the outcome and I think an innovative grassroots campaign could produce much different results, but that's my quibble. I still think the simulation will help students see presidential campaigns in a more realistic way.

To get simple news on a website, I currently like to use clips from NBC/MSNBC as they let you embed their video. If you have a website that let's you do that, you're good to go. Find a story that gives the information you want and then copy the code and paste it into your website.