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Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

ISTE NETS*S

Design a Conceptual Framework

The following prompts will help you define the conception framework of your project.

For individuals: Reflect on this series of questions and record your responses on your own wiki page. Be ready to share at your next team meeting. Don’t become too wedded to your ideas yet.

For a group: When you meet, share and discuss your individual responses, then respond to the questions again together. If you aim for a collaborative project, try to “mash up” your efforts into one shared project idea.

1. What important and enduring concepts are fundamental to each subject you teach? List them. Try to limit the list to two to three big concepts for each subject. Refer to content standards you teach to determine those covered by these big “umbrella” concepts. 

Social Sciences: Geography:

CCG: Analyze the causes of human migration (e.g., density, food and water supply, transportation and communication systems) and its effects (e.g., impact on physical and human systems).

Understand how physical geography affects the routes, flow, and destinations of migration.

Identify patterns of migration and cultural interaction in the United States.

NCSS 5th Grade Standards:

Describe the U.S. migration and settlement patterns and explain geographic influences on settlement patterns.
Recognize the causes, effects, processes and patterns of human movements, both chosen and forced.
Recognize voluntary and involuntary migration factors (e.g., drought, famine, economic opportunity, conflicts, slavery).
Understand the migrations from Europe and Africa to colonies in North America, westward migration to Oregon in the 19 th century, migrations of people from southeast Asia and Latin America to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.

2. Why do these concepts matter? Why are they important?

It's important for students to learn how maps can be used to provide information about a variety of activities, distributions, and earth and ocean features.

The primary purpose of the social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world. (NCSS position paper)

Americans' ignorance of their own country and of the world will have dire consequences for our nation's welfare, strength, and global interdependence and for the effects we have on people in other nations. Geographic education is vital to correct this ignorance and can give future generations the knowledge and understanding they need to manage the earth's resources wisely.

   Geographic education can satisfy our deep need to know about other people and places, the natural environment, the capacity of the earth to support human life, and to inform our own individual perceptions of places. Thus geographic education requires knowing where things are located, but more importantly requires a system for inquiring why they are there and where they should be.

   Now, more than ever, citizens of the United States can ill afford to ignore their own lack of geographical understanding.

   The current unit is focused on United States geography. Many students in fourth through eighth grade lack basic understandings of both the scale and diversity of the United States. Many students do not understand the different regions of the country have different topographical, economic, and recreational features. The activities of Geoteam are especially designed to show the interrelationship of the topographical features with economic and recreational activities commonly seen in different regions of the country. (http://curriculumwebs.com/OurUS/TeachingGuide.htm)

3. Outside of school, who cares about these topics? What is their relevance in different people’s lives and in different parts of the world?

4. Select one or two of the most promising of these topics and think about real-to-life contexts to answer: What are the interdisciplinary connections? What other subjects might be incorporated?

Math is easily connected to any of these topics. Writing and literacy could also be connected. Some other possibilities are demography and history

5. As you begin to imagine working with these topics, how might you push past rote learning into analysis, evaluation and creation? Incorporate Bloom’s “rigor” verbs in your answer.

 designing a migration story

collaborating with a team

6. Imagine authentic ways students might engage in this topics within a project and the ways 21st century skills might be addressed. Hint: The terms collaboration, digital tools, and information literacy could appear in your answer!

• Tell their community migration story through maps, photos, and interviews

• Use maps to analyze data and track migration

• Use primary sources to discover their community’s history

• Learn how to tell a story through photography and interviews

  create original works as a means of personal or group expression

contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems

locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media

7. What aspects of these topics will interest your students? (A feature that seems superficial or tangential but fascinates students can give you entrée into more essential matters, so brainstorm as many as you can.)

 students may become interested in home their family came to America or Oregon

understanding community history

interviewing community and/or family members

photography

8. What learning dispositions should you cultivate and ask your students to pay attention to? (REINV p. 51-52)

curiosity, resourceful, cooperation, motivation, self-confidence

PROJECT SKETCH:

In 5th grade students analyze human migration and U.S. regions. I am thinking that I can get students to be highly engaged learning about migration in conjunction with gaining some basic knowledge about the different U.S. Regions. I would like students to work together to look at the movement of people throughout time, why they migrate to our Northwest region. These imprints on a region include its ethnic make-up, spoken languages, religious institutions, traditions, architectural styles, local food, music, clothes, and other cultural markers—all clues to the past, present, and future of that area and generations of its people. Thus, an essential part of understanding a region is its migration story. This is it in a nutshell. I wonder if kids could make illustrated timelines of the peoples of a region. Thinking... Students will  understand key concepts of human migration through the examination of maps and migration patterns. Students will research and document the impact of migration on a region's cultural landscape. They will examine migration patterns on a global and national scale as a class and then apply that understanding to telling a migration story about their own community. Then connect with and learn about a different region and their culture through ePals. Students will work in collaborative groups to tell their community migration story through maps, photos, and interviews.

Mini-Lessons

Students will first need to learn about migration.

• What are some different types of human movements?
• Why do people move? Ask students to think about the forces that drive human migration

 Students then will look at a map that shows migration patterns in our country and out.

• From which continents are the most people leaving?
• To which continents are the most people moving?
• What are some patterns of migration in North America? In the United States?
• Why do you think these patterns are happening?

While present migrations are changing the face of the future, past migrations have helped shape the present makeup of populations. The ancestry, or roots, of the people in a region tie them to the migrations of their ancestors and help explain the history of the region. Have students share information about what they found out about the first people in their families (or the community group they leaned about) who came to the United States.

• How do the ancestry patterns of your class compare to those on the "Past Moves, Present Patterns" map?
• Do more people from certain countries immigrate to one area than another because their ancestors did? Why do you think this is so?
• How do you think communities with different ancestry and migration patterns are different from one another?
• What factors might contribute to these patterns?

  Have small groups of students investigate their community's migration story.