As you've aready seen, we've stormed into the "Web 2.0" world this week with Videoblogs galore. The girls successfully brought their new and improved GAOC reports onto the web and into their blogs they used last term. You can see them all from our class blog here and then clicking on the countries on the sidebar to the right. They did a great job working through the process and technical challenges of the first go-around and I'm looking forward to the coming week's performances.
We started our conversation on Thursday and Friday of last week about the Spanish American War and America's emergence as a global power. On Thursday and Friday we examined two poems, "Let me be blesséd for the peace I make." by Katherine Lee Bates (who is better known for writing "America the Beautiful"); and "The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling. We had a great conversation about the emotional appeals to religion and patriotism contained in both, each with a different conclusion on the right path for the U.S. This week, we continued our conversation about jingoism, underlying racism in turn of the century ideas of social progress, as well as differences within the Black community at the time about the appropriateness of offering volunteers to fight in this war. We then turned our eye to the role of the media and the concept of Yellow Journalism and looked at the front pages from The World and the New York Journal following the explosion on the Battleship Maine. We finished yeaterday by discussing how all of these themes related to current events in the world today. As always, they drew fantastic connections and the conversation was rich. Lastly, I handed out the assignment sheet for their final project, a video documentary on the relationship between the US and their country from the past to present. They'll be starting work on this next week.
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