Final Project

You can access my final project on google docs with the following link:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYKRzPeoSpNEZGdwa253M25fMWczM3ZuZGdz&hl=en

Thanks for a great semester!

Film Adaptations

I use film adaptations all of the time in teaching social studies. It takes a lot of time to find the perfect clip, but students really enjoy it and I think that it really reinforces material from their readings. Currently I am adapting the HBO Miniseries John Adams to show parts of in the next couple of days. It is a great miniseries that gives seemingly authentic looks at the time of the Revolutionary War. I am also currently adapting the movie Luther to show to my world history class. Sometimes I show very short clips from youtube from shows such as 300 or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Any type of visual really helps to engage students, as long as it is not too prolonged.

Frontline - Healthcare

I watched a Frontline documentary on healthcare recently that was filmed during the 2008 presidential race. The point was for the commentator to travel to five countries (Great Britain, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland, and Germany) that are obviously industrialized and "first world" countries, and to see what their healthcare situations were. The audience for this piece would be educated, middle-classed people who have the time and the interest to watch a program on healthcare. Also I suppose you could argue high school students could be a potential audience because my students watched it as well.

Techniques that I thought were effective were his tone of voice and what he said. He kept each segment to around nine/ten minutes and the way he spoke and how the scenes were shot kept a potentially boring subject, interesting. The interviews were well done and were with common people from the different countries as well as doctors and people from their governments.

There were various perspectives given, and the plusses and minusses were discussed, however I got a feeling of bias while watching. In every example the United States was the worst option available. For example, Japan's healthcare system is such and such, tweny zillion times better than the United State's healthcare system. The angle at which information was presented definitely had a pro-universal healthcare slant to it.

Overall the documentary was informative and engaging and I would recommend viewing it.

For a lesson plan, I would do what I have already done. I had my political science class watch the documentary, and while they were watching it they had to take notes on the different froms of healthcare each country had. After the show was over they had to write an essay about what an ideal healthcare system would look like and it could represent one country, or could be a hybrid of a few countries.

Song Analysis

I like a lot of styles of music. Recent concerts that I have been to are: Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Jason Mraz, Bruce Springsteen, and Bon Jovi. I like to attend concerts that are going to have musicians that are singing songs that I know, and also are going to put on a good show. The song that I pick is I'm Yours by Jason Mraz. All of last year I would have my students analyze the lyrics. One of his lines are, "I've been spending way too long checking my tongue in the mirror, and bending over backward just to try and see it clearer. But my breath fogged up the glass. So I drew a new face and I laughed." To me this means that he has been trying to figure out who he is and maybe is being someone that he truly isn't, which wasn't clear to him, hence the fog. So he changes from the person that others want him to be into a few face, which he likes. Jason Mraz has a good blog where he writes some pretty insightul stuff.

Kare 11 News Broadcast at 10:00 pm, 11-11-09

News broadcast analysis:

The first segment was on a woman, Monica Say, whose picture was shown and who was arrested after having been caught with her two children, ages two and four, in a car that was swerving. She was dignosed to have twice the legal limit of alcohol and she had marijuana in the car as well. Her children were not buckled in their car seats. They showed her arrest picture as well as they had a clip of the public safety director giving his opinion on the case. This was Kare 11s lead story and it lasted about two minutes. They attempted at making it really shocking to grab viewers attention and to create outrage and interest so that the viewers would keep watching.

The next segment was on two horses that got shot in two separate pastures, but owned by the same person. They used really good photo and video shots and you got a good sense of what happened to the horses, you saw the bullet wounds, and you felt sympathy for the horses. The shooter ended up being a thirteen-year-old autistic neighbor of the man who owned the horses. This segment was around 2 minutes as well.

After these two longer segments, the following were a bunch of quickly mentioned news:

* U of M football player accused of assault by a woman who says he hurt her after she spoke to his girlfriend
* Calvin Collum is a teacher who was arrested after having sex with a student at a high school
* Governor Pawlenty and Mike Jungbauer and the governor's race
* Unofficial winners of the election
* President Obama made an unscheduled stop in Arlington Cemetary
* ROTC vets had a vigil for Veteran's Day
* Lou Dobbs of CNN gave his last broadcast. He is quitting to pursue other interests

This next segment was longer, 1-2 minutes:

Minnesotans are watching more television due to the economy. They had clips of people watching tv and people giving their opinions

This segment was also longer, 2-3 minutes:

High school students were learning about money management in what this station calls its "Take Care of Your Money" report. The students were at a clinic where they went around to stations with a new identity and had to figure out how to live on a budget. I liked this segment, it was well shot and had good interviews.

Next is two short segments, about 30 seconds each:

The first was about a sandbag calculator for the Red River Valley to help figure out how many sandbags would be needed for flooding purposes.

The next segment was entitled "Before we go" and was a cutsie segment to end the show with, California skydivers.

Analysis:

I thought it was interesting that they were all young, attractive, and white. They began with a shocking story and the scary news first. Next they ran short political news, and then they ended with local and cutsie stuff.

News that I watch: I do a lot of internet news through yahoo and various other sites. I also watch Meet the Press every week.

One paragraph activity:

I would have my students in political science watch a few different news programs and their goal would be to record the topics and the angle they were presented in. Their goal would be to look for media bias. After they collected this information from various sites we would analyze it as a class, or they would write an essay explaining and analyzing their findings.

Crime Genre Analysis Powerpoint

Hello~

Here is the access to the analysis Jaime and I did on crime genres. We had a lot of fun recalling the similarities that crime genres have.

http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AUxg0wZoSxn0ZDVuM3piNl8zMmRmbjhjY2d6&hl=en

Activity for Advertisement

I think advertisements are a cool way to get students thinking about content as well as using their artistic abilities. One way that I could use this for my class is to have them create advertisements for our psychology memory unit. The students have to create an ad where they attract viewers based on their knowledge about the primacy-recency effect as well as short-term memory restraints. This would be applying some thicker vocab to an activity and hopefully would aide in recall.