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Primary Sources for African History Level: Intermediate --- Content: Social Studies |
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With the advent of
Internet-based maps, many students in Ms. Duarte’s middle grade World History
class had seldom seen paper maps, and none as ornate as those that Ms. Duarte
had provided links to from the Afriterra website. The class
was studying African history and were investigating the essential
question, “What can historical artifacts tell us about the thoughts and
attitudes of the societies that created them?” Ms. Duarte had selected a set
of maps representing points in time beginning with the early colonization of
Africa and continuing to the present day. She selected maps that had, in
addition to the geographic information typical in a map, ornate legends and
illustrations. These not only added a decorative touch, but also provided
insights into the thoughts and attitudes of the illustrators of the maps. Ms. Duarte’s students
were charged with reviewing the maps. and for each
map they were asked to respond to a series of questions that were organized
in a class wiki site. The questions included: What are the roles and
ethnic backgrounds of any characters that appear on the map? How do you
know this is so? What is the
relationship of that role or character to the African nations that comprise
the content of the map? Based on what you have
learned about African history, how would you, as a historian, interpret the
messages locked in the visual images on each map? Using the maps in
sequence, write a brief history of this region of Africa. Focus on the
societies from which the map authors came. Support your analysis with
references to the images and content on the selected maps. Each of the maps was
posted on VoiceThread.com and the students contributed their analyses as
comments on that map. In addition, they individually constructed a timeline
on Timerime Education that placed miniatures of the
maps in time and described the period in African history during which the map
was generated on that timeline. Ms. Duarte created a
two-part rubric to assess each student’s work using the Intel Assessing
Projects tool. The first part of the rubric provided an analysis of the
accuracy of their content knowledge and the quality of their insights into
each of the societies from which the maps had been drawn. The second rubric
analyzed the technical quality and creativity of the timeline that they
created. Resources used in this
scenario: Tools used in this scenario: |