Presidential Knife Fights for Review

OK, so this assignment was a little outside of my comfort zone, but I tried it and the students loved it!  I got the idea from a blog post about "What if all of the Presidents were involved in a massive knife fight to the death?  Who would win and why?"  Geoff Micks went through and developed stories and reasons for all 44 Presidents about why they would or wouldn't win this arena-style Hunger Games death match (very entertaining to read).

So, taking this idea further, I showed the students the example and had them come up with their own examples using people from our second semester of study.  The ideas I have gotten back thus far are really creative!  Hide-and-seek, water balloon fight, Hunger Games, chess matches, basketball games, etc.

What does this have to do with academia?  Well, in Bloom's Taxonomy, SYNTHESIS is one of the higher-order levels of thinking.  This exercise has students use information they know to create a hypothetical situation involving abstract ideas and then EVALUATE it by backing it up with evidence.  So there you go: two of Bloom's higher levels in one review activity.  I've found most review activities to be either rote memorization or recall activities.

Interactive Map Brings Substance to Emancipation

If you're like me, as a high school US History teacher, not a lot of emphasis is placed on the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. (Indiana divides it into two parts: 8th grade focuses on pre-colonial to the Civil War; 11th grade focuses on Civil War to the present with a small review of 1754 - 1865). Because of this, the Emancipation isn't presented with a lot of heart, meaning, or substance. One day the slaves were slaves, the next day they were free.

Fortunately, it wasn't that simple, and a new interactive map from the University of Richmond details and aggregates tons of information into a visual reference.

Look here for the original article on the Chronicle of Higher Education.

How Does It Affect Education?

Anything that can be represented visually is great for teaching a generation that has a screen in front of them for 1/2 of the day. This is a good way to show that emancipation of the slaves did not happen overnight. There are also lists of the data the map is representing, so you can have students look deeper into the data if you wish.