Ancient Civilizations –
Teaching Notes
The units designed and showcased within the Techno Bowl website have been created to engage students in higher-level cognitive skills. For those of us who have “tested” these units with our students, we discovered that some of the students have been anxious at the beginning of the unit because the assignment is open-ended and the students have to “fill in the gaps” with their own creativity and research. These units were intentionally designed to fully engage students in this manner and cover Archdiocesan Outcomes.
There are several good online sources for you to use with your students to help them keep track of their research. (The units don’t require use of either of these, they are just suggested here as teacher tools.) A good example is NoteStar, it allows the students to keep track of all their web sources while allowing you to check their progress. There are several programs that the students can use as well. The one we have used is Research Assistant Software, this software teaches students how to cite Internet sources correctly.
There is a wonderful online cite http://marcopolo.worldcom.com/ that has resources and links to all kinds of history sites. There are a number of links from the Student Pages for 5th Grade Ancient Civilizations.
Prior Knowledge Requirements:
Slide Show
Software, Power Point or Hyper Studio
How to correctly
site web sources (web
source citations)
Saving images
from web site and inserting them in Power Point or Hyper Studio
Important Notes:
Because of the
amount of on-line research and the requirement for using pictures and
graphics from the web, it is imperative that the students learn how to
cite each of these sources correctly. This may be a good
opportunity for a lesson on plagiarism.
Show and discuss
the rubric. Stress to the students that they
are graded using this rubric. Make sure they understand if any
elements are missing they will be graded down.