Group items tagged

Welcome to the EC Ning Online Workshop on Nazi Propaganda presented by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your facilitators are Carol Danks and Laurie Schaefer, both Museum Teacher Fellows and members of the Regional Education Corps for the USHMM.  This workshop will last for 21 days, from January 30-February 19th. So that you can best plan your time, here is the general outline for the workshop: Introduction & Overview: "State of Deception: Nazi Propaganda Online Workshop" January 30-February 1: Orientation to the State of Deception Website and Media Literacy questions February 2nd -7th Module 1: Exploring the concept of Inclusion through the theme: Defining the Enemy, Making a Leader, Rallying the Nation, and Indoctrinating the Youth. February 8th-12th: Module 2: Exploring the concept of Exclusion through the theme: Defining the Enemy February 13th-16th: Module 3: Propagating messages of Inclusion and Exclusion through the themes: Writing the News and Deceiving the Public February 17th: Module 4: Exploring Post Holocaust Propaganda and De-Nazification through the theme: Assessing the Guilt February 18th-19th: Teaching about Propaganda in the classroom: Resources, Lessons, Online Polls  

"The case can be made that all subject areas are important, but students often lack the educational opportunities to put their learning from these subject areas to work in the real world. My students now take part in community research projects where I ask them to identify a problem or issue that they care about in our local community. Their topics have included the school dress code, teen drug use, bullying, rural road conditions, and suicide prevention. In this process, students undertake a variety of research efforts. They work with primary sources. They interview community members, fellow students, and school officials. They create online surveys, and they visit the library, the museum, and the courthouse. They seek out knowledge from experts (including other teachers) regarding statistics, technology, and hazardous chemical compounds. They even become experts on the ins and outs of state laws that are relevant to their causes. They learn to value evidence. Sometimes that causes students to change their minds too. But just gathering the information isn't enough. We have to do something with that information. We have to take action and argue for reasonable solutions to our community issues based on the best information available. The secret is harnessing the spirit each student holds for the issue they seek to solve and allowing that spirit to develop each student's ability to reason. If I can accomplish that, I find that my students care enough about their writing to revise, edit, spell, and punctuate just fine. A recent study also confirmed that students' mastery of conventions can improve as a by-product of writing arguments on topics they care about. But first I had to go bigger with my expectations and with the lessons I valued. I had to believe they could change the world around them if I gave them the opportunity."

Includes three videos