Current Events Planning Session 1

I had my first planning with the Current Event teacher today, and it went wonderfully!  Her method of planning is to start with the beginning and the end of the project and meet in the middle - so basically, know your goals and your final project and figure out what it takes to get from point A to point Z.  Right now we're looking at an 8 day unit organized as follows:

• Day 1 - Presentation and discussion on why and how companies advertise.  We're looking into finding someone in the community who works in advertising and can talk a bit about that with the class.
• Day 2 - Presentation and discussion on how advertising affect teens (self-image, buying power, priorities, etc.) and how different tactics position viewers.  We'd like to provide specific examples of tactics used in advertisements.
• Day 3 - Introduce unit project.  We'll spend the class period in the library looking for advertisements in magazines.  Students will choose and mark their ads and I'll scan them in at the end of the day.  I'll also give a brief tutorial on Thinglink.
• Day 4 - Spent in the lab working on Thinglinks.
• Day 5 - Spent in the lab working on Thinglinks.  I need to think of something else for students who get done early to work on as well...
• Day 6 - It just so happens that day 6 will fall on the day after the Superbowl, and my co-teacher had the brilliant ideas to incorporate Superbowl commercials!  We'll view these and discuss them as a group using what we learned the previous week.
• Day 7 - Students will present their Thinglinks to the class in a 3 minute presentation.
• Day 8 - Finishing up the presentations.

During our discussion, we discussed:

• We want each student to read a different magazine so we get a broader view of advertising.  Since this class has 16 boys and only 2 girls, this might result in boys having to read "girl" magazines.  This might be a bit of a struggle because these students seem very immature.  Granted they're only in 8th grade, but we think having so many boys in one spot is making it difficult for them to focus and take the class seriously.
• The goal of the presentations is for the students to show that they can identify what ads try to get viewers to do and how they try to get viewers to do it.  I'll be making a rubric in advance that we can hand out to the students so they know what's expected of them.  The presentation will be a seperate grade from the Thinglink, which I will create a seperate rubric for.

Discipline is an ongoing issue for this class.  My student teaching supervisor, who has 30 years of teaching experience and a degree in psychology, suggests that we ensure that students know what is expected of them, basicly that they show respect for the classroom, their classmates, and the teacher.  But it seems that students are mostly in this elective because they perceive it to be a blow off class with little to no homework.  I want to ask my supervisor and the classroom teacher what they thing about making participation part of the grade for the class.  Students could get a point for every day of class.  If they contribute respectfully in class they keep their point, if not they lose their point.  But with this group, I'm not sure how well that would change their behavior...