Tuesday, May 20, 2014

MAY MADNESS

Now that the AP exam is over, the class will be shifting to two simultaneous activities.


The first is the traditional May Madness game, where each of you will take on the rolls of "great" leaders from world history and have a tournament to determine which was the "greatest."  The description of the project is linked up here, and details about the rounds are linked up here.  Much of the work for the tournament will be your homework and will be completed outside of class time. Comment on this post with who you will be representing!


While you are working on the May Madness outside of class, we will spend time in class working on a current events project.  The class will select an area of the world and an issue in that area.  The regions are aligned with those we've been looking at all year long, and the issues reflect the themes of AP World's curriculum.  After the region is identified, the class will generate a list of questions that need to be answered in order to be informed about the current issue the region is facing.  The class will then find answers to those questions.


Students will then be tasked with finding where the conversations about this issue are taking place.  Is it being discussed on Twitter? Facebook? Instagram? Newspaper comment boards? UN security council minutes? Students will then analyze the conversation to determine who the responsible players are; join the conversation, become a credible (knowledgable) participant in the dialog, seek to present solutions/ways forward, and get feedback on their ideas.  We will flesh this out more as we go along.

For homework tonight, visit each of the following links for each of the topics below, read the short articles about the issues, and come into class with a set of priorities about what you want to get involved with! These are just my suggestions for topics, a valid argument for something else can be made!


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