Political Campaigns (week 4)

Campaign ads have multiple goals:
I find EASE History to be a very compelling site for student education. It's use of short clips encourages students to draw conclusions based on easily digestable bites. Too often students are exposed to large amounts of content with which they feel overwhelmed and quickly lose interest.
In following the C7 assignment I found the instructions unclear and was unable to locate the artifacts icon to access the candidate profiles which apparently revealed their weaknesses and strengths. It therefore made it impossible to complete the assignment.

One case I found compelling from the 2004 campaign was "Rassman". It was a Kerry-funded reaction piece to the 'swiftboat' campaign. The accusation put forth in the 'swiftboat' campaign was Kerrey had misrepresented his Vietnam record. A first-person endorsement of Carey about his heroism in combat by Rassman was created to counter the conservative campaign that represented Carey as weak in both honesty and war.

Barry Goldwater's Castro campaign ad is a direct attack on LBJ. Mocking LBJ, Goldwater reminds Americans that the 'bearded dictator 90 miles off our coast' continues to thumb his nose at our great democracy. It associates LBJ with the Bay of Pigs fiasco to paint him in a negative light during the height of the Cold War.

While searching for the profiles I stumbled stumble across the Cold War segment which I found to be an excellent summary of events. I have postponed the 'Cold War' exam for my students, pending exposure to this content. I will shedule them for the computer lab and allow each to experience the content and react to it on their blogs with some guided questions (e.g. What was different about the Yalta and Potsdam conferences? How did the Cuban Missile Crisis change relations between the superpowers? Why was there a 'space race'?)



Presidential candidate's e-presence:



Router restrictions make using some technology difficult
I've been able to use blogging extensively with my students of both Global History and Economics. 'Chalk & talk' classroom instruction has gone the way of the dinosaur, so educators must find compelling ways to engage students with the content they must master. Lecture notes are non-existent so students don't value or keep notebooks. Worksheets are often not retained by either. The challenge at year-end assessment time is easy retrival of learned, but forgotten, content with which to review. The answer is an on-line notebook.

I've experimented with multiple ways for students to electronically submit work this year and found personal blogs to be the most effective. E-mail submission creates a logjam in my in-box and becomes a one-way depository requiring the students to maintain their own filing system for future retrieval. The district uses e-chalk and I've used it for numerous assignments and postings, but found it lacking as well. It offers the advantage of a summary sheet listing submission status by student, but the cumbersome file attachment function requires download of the file and firing up the local application prior to evaluating the student's work.

I've had my students create their own blogs to submit assignments. This creates an easily accessible archive to key assignments over the course of the year. It is easier for me to review their work through a single browser interface. It also makes their retrival process easier. They would be more likely to visit their blog and review multiple entries than open the same number of files in their native applications. They can also visit other student's blogs and participate in discussions.

The use of other sites with which they are already familiar (e.g. Facebook or MySpace) is impractable due to restrictions programmed into the school router.