Learning with iPad - Finding and Rating Sources for an Issue in Social Studies with Numbers

 

Context

As a humanities teacher, I am often confronted with the fact that students are more reactive than proactive when it comes to the subject. And I can't blame them since we tend to always give students the sources and then have them "analyse" them purely for answers to questions posed.

Hence, let's flip this around. Let's get students to understand a given issue by finding sources of their own that either supports, not support, or fall somewhere in between the continuum, review, them, share and then decide on the best sources that encapsulates the issue.

 

Preparation and Flow

Here's the plan:

  1. Give an issue e.g. "Is Singapore more inclusive as a society today than 10 years ago?"
  2. Get students to pair/group up and search for sources that agrees, disagrees and explores a tangent to the given issue statement
  3. Have students review and enter their sources into a numbers doc with the source links
  4. Share the sources at the end with each group
  5. Have students critically evaluate which sources provide good perspectives and support
  6. Then answer the question - are we more inclusive today

 

You can choose to use the slides and attached Numbers file for this purpose if you wish.

Hence by getting students to reverse this process, we are increasing student agency by:

  1. Giving them independence to find sources of various varieties
  2. Exercise judgement and critical thought
  3. building an argument based on their own search experience

 

Possible Extension

I have chosen to use Numbers since it is a powerful spreadsheet that has options to include multimodal learning inputs e.g. recording a voice/sound, adding music/songs/videos etc. While exams are written, it does not preclude the possibility of having students engaging in various viewpoints through the fertile media all around us. This might help them be more grounded in precisely the skills that we want them to have in line with a humanities education.


From the LearnGrowCreate Team

Main author: Thomas

Attachments

Attachments

Singapore Secondary Schools

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