Several days ago, Andy Carvin wrote a post detailing a new PBS site designed to help teachers and students make sense of the upcoming November elections. Andy is understandably excited about the site – not only does it contain excellent info but it also encourages and supports a variety of social media tools.
A group of organizations, including PBS, NPR and other public media entities, each committed to creating election tools and making them available to each other. While this may not seem like a big deal, it’s unusual for public broadcasters to collaborate editorially on this kind of scale. Meanwhile, many of these tools embraced social media as well, which for many of our organizations was relatively uncharted waters.
The site, Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Engagement, is broken into three different sections that contain video clips, resources and assessment tools. There are some nice media literacy pieces embedded into the site’s activities. Teachers can download lesson plans that ask kids to think at very high levels as well as subscribe via RSS feeds to the latest information on current election issues and races.
I’ve been poking around the site for a bit and am very impressed. Take a look for yourself!
I love this link. I still remember when our sixth grade class had elections for “Mayor for a Day” (creating a campaign, giving a speech, etc.) and “voted” in the 1996 presidential elections. We got to get hands on with the whole political process and learned a lot in the process. Even if students aren’t able to vote, getting them involved early makes for smart, informed voters later in life.
Andrea,
I agree! I think the site does a great job of getting kids to dig deeper into issues and to actually think about the process.
I just ran across what looks like another great site called “My Two Cents for Change” that hopes to get kids involved and have posted a bit on it over at:
http://historytech.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/my-two-cents-to-change/
(Thanks for the comment!)
glennw