Friday, April 10, 2015

Historical Investigation, Day 8 - Class Recap


A tree with prayer flags on the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu. It was quite an experience to climb up to this point! There are multiple students studying an aspect of a Chinese revolution for their historical investigation. Photo taken in 2014.

Dear class,

I have to say, I am pretty disappointed with where many students were at today in terms of the peer review on the historical investigation. Well over half the class was missing big aspects of the paper, which means there is a lot of work ahead this weekend! Here's what we did today in class:

Learning Targets: 
Knowledge LT 20: I can explain the impacts of nationalism and revolutionary movements.
Communication LT 3: I can effectively use the conventions of writing.
Research LT 1: I can develop and refine a research question or topic.
Research LT 3: I can responsibly and accurately cite sources.
Critical Thinking LT 2: I can explain connections between events, issues, problems and concepts.

Soundtrack: "You've Got A Friend" by Carole King and James Taylor. Selected for today because a good friend doing a peer review helps a lot, and I wanted everyone to know I was going to try to help as much as possible to get you in a position to be successful on this project. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 4/10/15:
News Brief - Nolan
Peer Review
Work Time
Conferences

Homework: Read the blog! Final draft (printed copy) of Historical Investigation is due next class. Next news brief: Ben.
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News Brief: Mary had the news brief today and selected an article about this story to talk about: CNN.com - Obama, Castro spoke by phone ahead of Panama summit. This was about the recent thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba. We talked about what that might mean, as well as the possible lifting of parts of the embargo that has been happening for 50 years.

We also watched VICE News for the day, before moving on.

The next news brief was assigned to Ben.

Peer Review: Today's class was supposed to be focused on getting as many good peer reviews on your historical investigation as possible. Here was the sheet I passed out in class for people to use.


Make sure that you look to correct spelling and grammar, as well as the format issues!

Work Time: The rest of class was devoted to working on review or doing whatever possible on the historical investigation. Here is the final assignment, again, if you need to look at it:


And here is an example of a historical investigation done by another student, which might help with formatting. The OPVL/Part C is different in this student paper, so ignore that aspect.

Conferences: As students were working on review, I called each student in the class up to talk about where they were at, what support was needed, what changes I saw needed to be done, or in some cases, just asking what in the world has been going on for the last month, since there was so little productivity to be seen. For many students, there is a LOT of work over this weekend to be done.

As always, if you are confused about what to do, please email me or comment and I would be happy to help. I suspect at this point most students know what to do - they just wanted to put it off until the very last moment to get it done. Well, that moment has arrived. Work hard this weekend, please.

4 comments:

  1. hey Fritz i was wondering what i could od if i couldn't find a book source for the historical investigation?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Damon,

      You need to find a source that exists in print, somewhere. That could be a newspaper article, an academic journal (like those found on the Westview library website), or a book found searching Google Scholar. All of those exist in print somewhere. That should help!

      Delete
    2. alright thank you ill give it a look to find one

      Delete

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