President Obama’s 2010 Back to School Speech

President Obama is giving his 2010 Back to School Speech today at 1PM ET.  This is an opportunity for the President to speak to students about the importance of education and encourage them as they start back to school.  Last year the President petitioned students to remember that “Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.”

The speech will be offered with live streaming from CNN and WhiteHouse.gov.  I am also offering live streaming below:

The Road to the Capitol

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What it is: The Road to the Capitol has to be one of the coolest sites I have seen to help kids understand government and the campaign and election process.  Students are immediately greeted by a newspaper headline “Congressman Retires: who will represent the US on Capitol Hill?”.  Students are then taken to a TV ad of one of the candidates running for congress, Roberta Glass.  Roberta thinks that kids have too much freedom and should be banned from freely accessing media like movies, TV, video games, and the computer.  Students are offered the opportunity to run against Roberta Glass in the election.  Students must register as a candidate in the election and are then introduced to their campaign manager.  Students make 5 campaign stops in their local congressional district.  At each stop, it is their job to help citizens understand the importance of protecting freedom.  Students can stop at campaign headquarters at any time to get briefed for each campaign event.  At the Campaign Headquarters, students click on important topics to get briefed on such as: Justice and Equality, Rights to Privacy, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of Expression, and Freedom of Religion.  When students choose a topic, they are taken to subtopics that lead them to rich resources where they can delve deeper into the topic and learning.  Along the campaign trail, students have to make their own commercial, give a speech, talk to students about the freedom of expression, answer questions in a press conference, and debate Roberta Glass head to head.  I can’t stress enough what an awesome interactive site this is.  Every webquest should involve kids in the story and process the way this one does!

How to integrate The Road to the Capitol into the classroom: This is an incredible self-guided learning experience.  Students will learn about our democratic system in depth by completing this activity.  The Road to the Capitol is really best experienced by individual students in a computer lab setting where they have plenty of time to research and complete each stop along the campaign trail.  If you don’t have access to a computer lab, the activity could be completed as a whole class using an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer.  To make The Road to the Capitol a more in-depth project, have students take campaign notes along the way in a word processing program.  They can later sum up what they learned and recorded in their notes by copying the notes and pasting them into a word cloud program like Wordle.  Students could create short campaign commercials based on the commercial they created in the game.  These can be recorded with PhotoBooth on a Mac or with a video camera.  Students could also create a campaign poster using a word processing or publishing program.

At the beginning of this interactive, you will see the campaign commercial of Roberta Glass.  The commercial talks about taking away kids freedoms, I imagine that some passionate discussion about the commercial could follow.

Tips: Really, go check out this website.  You won’t be disappointed!  Press the “Stop” button on the game to get the teacher/parent pdf guide.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using The Road to the Capitol in your classroom.

Obama’s Inauguration Speech

What it is: Barak Obama’s inauguration speech is taking place tomorrow morning!  Make sure that your students (regardless of age) are a part of this historic moment.  Wouldn’t it be neat if your students remembered sitting in your classroom watching and discussing the speech?  Hulu is going to host the speech live.  Because traffic to Hulu is bound to be heavy, I am also going to embed the speech right here on iLearn Technology.  Feel free to come here and watch the speech with me!  

 

How to integrate Obama’s Inauguration Speech into the classroom:  It isn’t every day that you can watch history in the making live in your classroom!  This is a historic moment that every student should be a part of.  Come back to iLearn Technology or Hulu to view the speech live.  It might be fun to make up a speech bingo card and see how many of the words students can pick out of the speech.  I’m sure a ready made bingo card will pop up somewhere!  If it does, I will update this post with the link.  

 

Tips: It will be interesting to see what people are saying about the speech via Twitter! 

 

Leave a comment and tell us how your students responded to the speech.

Inauguration Speech Generator

What it is: With President Obama’s Inauguration speech looming on the horizon, this site is worth a look.  Inauguration Speech Generator is like a mad lib, fill in the blank that generates a speech for President Obama to say.  🙂   Students enter words in the blanks according to the part of speech that is requested and then read the speech they have written for our soon to be president.  

 

How to integrate Inauguration Speech Generator into the classroom:  This is  a great lead in to teach students about the Inauguration of President Obama.  It is also a fun way to practice those parts of speech!  Students can fill in the blanks individually and share with a partner, or a speech can be generated as a whole class.  This would be a fun thing to do right before the inauguration.  Save the students version of the speech.  They can compare and contrast their speech with the actual inauguration speech after viewing it.

 

Tips: The inauguration is supposed to be live on CNN, it would be fun to watch live but I suspect that Internet may be slow that day!  Those of you with cable in the classroom take advantage!!

 

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Inauguration Speech Generator in your classroom.