Social inquiry- using Youtube to understand values.

One aspect of learning in social studies in New Zealand, is students carrying out inquiries that include looking at people's values. A relevant topic for this is boy racers- young men in cars who like to race and do burnouts in the cities on Friday and Saturday nights. In the past we have got students to ascertain the different values by reading newspaper articles. Today, the boy racers themselves are developing classroom resources through Youtube. Watching the attached video students should be able to clearly identify boyracer values from a boyracer source.
A bit of a dilemma may be that some of the students may become boyracers as a result of this!!!

xtimeline- develop a timeline collaboratively.

xtimeline lets your students create a timeline on any subject, linking in information and resources. They can work collaboratively on a project like a wiki.

Of interest to the teacher:

'There are privacy settings for the timeline creator, determining who can view a timeline, who can contribute to a timeline, and who can comment on a timeline. The layout for these timelines is clean, readable, and easy to navigate, which are all key functions to having a useful timeline on the Internet. The information for any given module on a timeline can be viewed along side the timeline, or as a full page, which has the formatting functionality of a blog entry.' (from http://mashable.com/2007/07/05/xtimeline/)

There are some interesting ones on the site including a timeline for the crisis in Darfur, history of music in the USA and various wars and historical events. A class or group in a class could develop one to show historical events, this could be added to over successive years...

Many thanks to Pam for letting me know about this tool.