Week 8

Right now the grade 8 students I work with have just started learning about the War of 1812. One of the Social Studies teachers is using Google Sites to incorporate technology into her lesson plan. "Sites" is part of Google Drive which I have blogged about in previous posts. I believe this to be a great technological resource for education purposes and highly recommend it to others. This teacher created her own Site for the War of 1812, chose fifteen pertinent topics related to the war, and created a works cited page. Students are assigned a different topic in which they will share with students in other class periods instead of their own. Each student is to research their topic and find as much important information about their topic as they can. They then add this to their corresponding topic on the War of 1812 Site. The collaboration aspect comes into play when working with their peers in other classes that have their same topic. The goal is to not repeat any information and to have the entire topic covered to the best of their abilities. Then, for their assessment, they will be given a written test on the topics of the war and each student uses the Google Site to get the answers from. This way, the students must take ownership of their work because the better the information is on the Site the better it will help them on the test.

In regards to the history of the War of 1812, I learned today that New York and New England did not want to declare war on Great Britain and wanted to avoid war at all costs. There were even some citizens in these areas that wanted to secede from the rest of the US because of this reason. After the war ended, with the Treaty of Ghent, neither the US or Great Britain gained or lossed any land or territory. The only thing the US gained was fishing rights in the Saint Lawrence River. Time, money, and human lives were wasted for merely nothing. I can understand why NY and NE never wanted war in the first place.