Discovery Education Digital Board
I really enjoyed this weeks assignment. I hadn’t used Discovery Education’s Board Builder so the experience was new to me. I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop last week and one of the breakout sessions was about Discovery Education’s Board Builder. The workshop reviewed a lot of the features like building a class, sharing, and ideas about student projects.
The project I created features The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, my school district’s “One Book” initiative for the year. The book is about a young boy in Malawi. His community is threatened during a horrible drought. People are starving to death, in part because of corruption within his country and in part due to a lack of resources that we take for granted. His family can no longer afford to send him to school so he is forced to drop out. He is determined to return to school after the drought and doesn’t want to fall behind in school, so he goes to the library and studies everything he can get his hands on.
He loved learning about science, and when he came upon a book about windmills he was determined to make one for his home. Through much trial and error and using only scrap and bartered materials he was able to make a windmill that provided his family with electricity, which included lights and a well pump.
One of the themes that runs through our Humanities class is human rights. This project is designed to tie these two topics together and get students thinking about issues outside of their community. I expect students to begin to understand other cultures and world issues and to seek begin to ask questions. Why do I enjoy the quality of life that I do, when other people are starving? Would I be able to do what the author did with so little formal education? How is his family like mine? What can I do when I see injustice in the world? When students begin to ask questions like these they are being guided to develop their respectful and ethical minds.