On Friday in Religion, Ethics and Morals I decided I wanted to focus on the massive catastrophe unfolding in Haiti after the earthquake on Tuesday Jan. 12th. In order to this in two lessons I decided to set up three groups, three collaborative documents in GoogleDocs with the following keywords:
Haiti’s Colonial Past
Range of devastation after the earthquake
Geography of Haiti
Organisaitons involved in helping and rescuing
Papa Doc and Baby Doc
Earthquakes and Richter’s Scale
The role of social media such as Facebook and Twitter spreading the message
The best way to help
Range of devastation after the earthquake
Geography of Haiti
Organisaitons involved in helping and rescuing
Papa Doc and Baby Doc
Earthquakes and Richter’s Scale
The role of social media such as Facebook and Twitter spreading the message
The best way to help
To start the lesson I used Google Earth’s updated layers showing the devastation in Port-au-Prince on the Smartboard to give the students an idea of the horrific consequences in Haiti. Then the groups had 30 minutes to go online and work as journalists: searching and acquiring relevant information under time pressure.
They were allowed to copy and paste texts, photos, maps, graphs and models to expand on the keywords given. They had to work fast, delegate work among themselves and make quick decisions on the go. When time was up they had 10 minutes to sort out all the information they had acquired in the stressful half hour they had online. Main task was to create the best overview which they were to present to the other students on a Smartboard. They should focus on relevance, overview and sources.
The groups presented at the end of the lesson, having 5 minutes each at their disposal. It was quite impressive what they had been able to find during their research; not only extensive information about Haiti’s geography, history, people, political life but also good explanations of Richter’s Scale, tectonic shifts and the fault line along with what is being done now as we were discussing it and what we could do ourselves.
To wrap up the lesson I asked the students if they could share with the rest of the class one fact that they had learned during these two lessons, and the variety and range of knowledge acquired was great. We did also discuss the relevance of the different keywords in the context of the earthquake. How important is Haiti’s flora and fauna? How relevant is a comprehensive biography of Papa Doc? What about Haiti’s colonial past and France’s role in it?
It was interesting to see how easy it is to gather great amounts of information into the classroom by means of crowdsourcing, but certain problems should also be addressed if method is used:
- How to make sure that all students are involved? My groups were too big (5-6 students), ideal groups are perhaps 3-4?)
- How to deal with citations, copyright infringement? I decided to give the students carte blanche as my main focus for the lessons were to gather all information in a short amount of time. Must be discussed if one decides to expand on a project in forms of essays, presentations, web pages, blog etc.
- Students should have been given more time to discuss their choices of what to present, including discussing validity of sources. Is a Twitter message trustworthy compared to a BBC news report?
