Students whom create and present media & makerspace projects before an audience are empowered with the creative confidence to make, build, and tell a story that goes far beyond the covers of a dusty history book.
We began with the expertly curated resources available on the National WWII Museum's website. It's loaded with a myriad of primary sources and easy to access and understand secondary sources. I do not have a lexile-level for their PDFs, but I will say that everyone in our learning community used these resources with relative ease, especially when chunking and conducting pair-share check ins.
Our Learning Goal:
-To make something that would teach an audience, between the ages of 10-110, about WWII - It's was an ambitious, personalized approach that paid off in a big way. The agency the students developed in the making of this project took our classroom to a new level.
-Students browsed the digital archives and used the resources labeled "WWII at a Glance".
-The four topics branch out into mini lessons on more specific events--slices of time that give our students access to the past in a way that they have never been exposed to: to be living participants in WWII history.
Students were encouraged to use the WWII Museum's online collection. However, for special-focus topics, we accessed materials from other institutions, including the Holocaust Museum and the Smithsonian, both in Washington DC.
The most critical part was guiding students to tell the story of how this event or movement might be historically significant. It's tempting, as a teacher, to want to step in... Ample feedback from peers helped to reinforce the message that the WWII Media & Makerspace project was an opportunity for students to "take over and teach". I took notes on the feedback that students received, and passed them along so groups could get started on the next iteration.
The use of templates and agile resources that get students to reflect upon the process of storyboarding and pacing their research and curated content... This is an area that I would like to improve upon in my next iteration. I realized at this phase that I did not establish a set guide or a few options for students to use for this phase of the project.
My fear was that if I did, it would feel overly scripted--as a worksheet. However, I think that students would have benefitted from seeing the thinking process made visible via agile resources that make us slow down and take pause to reflect and take purposeful action.
I love exercising student voice and choice. The students were free to select their groups, topics, and learning object that they would create. The majority elected to use digital media to make Animoto videos. A handful opted for a more maker-centered approach and crafted memory boxes, scrapbooks, and mobiles. One student even used Tinker CAD to design 3-D printed WWII style propaganda empowering modern women.
It's amazing to see what our students come up with when we get out of the way and equip them with the agency to take over and teach.
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