It may seem strange to discuss social studies and IWBs but I recently had the pleasure of using one for my own personal interests and pursuits, namely politics. At the time I used one, it was leading into the final week of a by-election and I used it to overlay:
* seat demographics by age; employment status; earnings; car ownership; family size etc * what areas had been letter box dropped * locations of polling centres and the primary vote recorded at that centre.
It was an interesting exploration of statistics; developing graphical representations of information which assisted in minimizing overlapping in letter box drops and therefore waste. Helped the campaign team better understand the different parts of a diverse seat as indicators of the issues they may interested in hearing about from us. It also provided an historical starting point for possible areas to spend more time in based on the vote recorded at the last election.
Sure you can't really ask kids to do this, but you could start a mock parliament or 'seat' election campaign and have social studies' students have a candidate and organise the campaign with kids voting. The more candidates the more interesting of course. The IWB I think will provide a powerful visual representation of dense numerical information. I was able to search the Internet while pretty much at the same time build different maps (colour coded shading) based on the information I was able to find.
I thought I would share this experience, as someone who is not an educator, and see what people thought.
started by anonymous on 24 Jul 08
* seat demographics by age; employment status; earnings; car ownership; family size etc
* what areas had been letter box dropped
* locations of polling centres and the primary vote recorded at that centre.
It was an interesting exploration of statistics; developing graphical representations of information which assisted in minimizing overlapping in letter box drops and therefore waste. Helped the campaign team better understand the different parts of a diverse seat as indicators of the issues they may interested in hearing about from us. It also provided an historical starting point for possible areas to spend more time in based on the vote recorded at the last election.
Sure you can't really ask kids to do this, but you could start a mock parliament or 'seat' election campaign and have social studies' students have a candidate and organise the campaign with kids voting. The more candidates the more interesting of course. The IWB I think will provide a powerful visual representation of dense numerical information. I was able to search the Internet while pretty much at the same time build different maps (colour coded shading) based on the information I was able to find.
I thought I would share this experience, as someone who is not an educator, and see what people thought.