Help me give my students four digital cameras to create historical news reports, documentaries, and public service announcements!
$921 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
Do you remember your history classes? For many, the thought of history evokes dry lectures and textbook readings about chronology and irrelevant events. ("Bueller?") For my 6th graders, however, studying history means interviewing peers to create oral histories, conducting historical research to create museum exhibits, and crafting documentaries and TED Talks.
In my 6th grade history classroom, I try to bring ancient history to life through project-based learning, collaboration, and technology.
I teach 100 brilliant, resilient, and thoughtful students of color, many of whom are impacted by trauma. By teaching my students to develop their critical reading, writing, and thinking skills, I hope to help them better understand historical inequities in order to fight for social justice.
My Project
For the past two years, the culminating assignment for students in my sixth grade history class has been a video project. In 2018, students created news reports about the city states of Athens and Sparta. In 2019, they created documentaries about an event in history from two different historical perspectives. All of this has taken place despite two major challenges. First, students have previously been filming with a single borrowed camera and tripod belonging to a former teacher at my school. Additionally, due to a lack of physical space, students have completed all of their filming inside of my classroom closet. This year, I am also now on a team of two sixth grade teachers, and each of us serve over 100 students, meaning that sharing a single camera is now completely impossible. I have also been relocated to a smaller classroom, which does not have space for a designated filming area.
For the spring of 2020, my goal is for students to write, produce, and edit a public service announcement (PSA) as their culminating history project.
After learning about the Silk Road, students will make connections to present-day globalization. They will conduct research about a related issue such as migration, global warming, or the exploitation of factory workers, and use their knowledge to create their own PSAs. This unit will build not only their content knowledge, but also their argumentative writing, group-work, research, and public speaking skills.
A set of four digital cameras would allow multiple groups of students to film simultaneously at various locations on our school campus, improving the quality of their final products while also making this type of project sustainable long-term. In addition, these cameras could be lent out to the other teachers on campus for their own projects, reaching all of our 724 students.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Ullman and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
