Gifted Study of the History of Neighborhoods
Technology Supports Lesson Plans for Gifted
Sep 21, 2008
Using the Project Cyber-City model, each cooperative team will adopt a persona reflecting a student from a hundred years back. The teams will have to research the families and names from then, and put some thought into developing a full social and business profile for their fictional boy or girl.
Technical Presentation Aspects
There are several elements of Project Cyber-City to consider, such as the Neighborhoods that the students come from, a strict Timeline, your Resources, Expected Outcomes and Final Products, how the Grading/Assessment works, and the presentation of the Project Cyber-City Web Site. For illustration purposes, here is how the Neighborhoods tasks can be defined:
Cooperative Neighborhoods
As Project Cyber-City utilizes cooperative groups, the next step is to assign roles within the groups. There are several tasks that need to be accomplished, and team members should be assigned according to their skills and preferences if possible.
The first task is Researcher. This student’s job is to do some background work in the neighborhoods along with an adult. Visit the neighborhood and talk with some of the older people trying to get a sense of what life was like a hundred years back.
The next task is Actor. This person will become their adopted student from 1908 for a movie to be filmed that allows the boys and girls the chance to speak as if they were alive and telling their stories in 1908.
The third task is Digger. The digger is the deep-researcher who does the reading and the surfing to gather and record as much information about the neighborhood as possible.
The fourth task is Techie. The Techie is the student who is responsible for taking all of the researched data and information and putting it into modern displays such as PowerPoint presentations, a FrontPage website, a website that displays all of the research, and the video.
The Other Elements
The lesson plan for Project Cyber-City needs to have several other issues defined before it can be given to the students, such as defining a strict Timeline, what Resources will be needed, what the Expected Outcomes and Final Products will be (for example, will there be a written report or electronic presentation to go along with the video), how the Grading/Assessment will be defined, and the design, construction, and presentation of the video and pictures on the Project Cyber-City Web Site.
Neighborhoods are the backbone of everyone’s way of life, no matter where or when one grew up. While history books have found new and different thematic methods to explore and explain what has come before, asking students to look inside their families and their neighborhoods to find for themselves how they got to where they are today can help provide depth of understanding for gifted students in their social studies classes.
