While I was working with the grade eight and nine Social Studies IRP documents this semester, I noticed something that was slightly worrying. While plenty of attention is paid to specific content areas, ensuring students will have plenty of facts, communication skills were virtually unrepresented. The only PLOs that require students to actually say anything are here:
    plan, revise, and deliver written and oral presentations Grade 8
    plan, revise, and deliver formal oral and written presentations Grade 9

There is no requirement to work in collaboratively, in groups or partnerships, no debate, or even just basic public speaking skills. I feel like an important part of learning Social Studies is being able to effectively communicate an idea, and despite the possibly pervasive influence of the Blogosphere, face to face communication is still the most effective way to this.

What do you think? Has my dramatic bias been exposed? Is it more important to stick to the cold hard facts, or is the medium the message?

Video Review

Lawrence
super 8 review.egg on Aviary.

Top secret documents, in MY classroom?

I wanted to write a post on Wikileaks, basically, how a Social Studies teacher should deal with such a controversial set of documents... what would be the best approach?  I want to work with these documents because I feel like there are many opportunities for genuine learning experiences that could arise from working with such exciting material.

That was my initial reaction.

This last week, the Orwellian response of the US government has given me pause, in terms of what I would be comfortable teaching in my classroom, and what I would be comfortable saying online. Students at some US universities got emails last week recommending that they “DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.” I have decided that, given the current climate, a better question might be:  what is the best way a Social Studies teacher can hide these documents from their students?

Some suggestions:

Ignore the documents? 

Threaten them?

Teach the students how to orchestrate a DoS attack? 

All good options.

I thought that overt government censorship went out with McCarthy. Was there this sort of a clampdown when the Watergate documents were released? What else is hidden within these documents? Over 3 million people had access to them, so they weren’t exactly secure to begin with.

My question to you, my colleagues is:

If you were currently teaching a class, would you feel comfortable bringing the Wikileaks documents to school, for your students to analyze?