Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Here in North Carolina, we’re coping with a budget shortfall. Valuable programs are facing cuts, and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. I don’t envy Governor Bev Perdue or anyone else making these decisions, as pretty much any decision they make will make life worse for a lot of people. You can help convey the stakes of the situation to your students with the Balance the Budget Challenge, a game from the North Carolina governor’s office that lets us common folk try to balance a budget with a $2.4 billion deficit.

The Balance the Budget Challenge presents you with dozens of options that can cut the state budget. Should you raise tuition to universities or community colleges? Release a few thousand prisoners from jail? Or perhaps you’d care to eliminate all school-nurse jobs in the state? You can also take measures that will promote long-term growth but raise the deficit in the short term — for example, you could increase financial incentives for business to move to North Carolina. When you’ve finished the challenge, simply press a button to submit your budget proposal to the Governor.

What struck me the most about the BTBC was the sheer number of cuts you need to make — after I cut what seemed like a massive amount of programs, I found I still had a few hundred million left to go. Lest you start on a slash-and-burn campaign in the hopes of “winning” the budget, the game also presents you with the consequences of your decisions — that is, you get to see an exact tally of how many people you just sent to the unemployment line.

My only complaint about BTBC was that it asks you to make cuts to education before any other category. Obviously some category had to be listed first, but I nearly gutted the public education budget altogether before I realized I had six more pages of possible cuts to consider. I have no idea if anyone in power actually reads these proposals, but front-loading the game with cuts to school spending potentially sends a message that North Carolina citizens see educational spending as expendable.

That complaint aside, I recommend the Balance the Budget Challenge as a fun, if sobering look at how a state budget operates. It does a good job of teaching about both fiscal responsibility and the human consequences of financial decisions.

Balance the Budget Challenge

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

All the news that’s fit to print, indeed. Newspaper Map is an amazing overview of how news is being published — and by extension, how history is being written — by connecting literally thousands of newspapers from around the world on a single interactive map. The site uses a basic format of a Google Map, with pin links to the actual newspapers in just about every place in the world. China? Check. Africa? Check. The Americas? Check. Iran? Not so much, but even the lack of a newspaper has the potential for a classroom discussion about freedom of information and journalism’s role in a country.

One of the nice things about Newspaper Map is that it uses Google Translate to automatically convert any newspaper into other languages, such as English. There is also a handy color-coded key to show the language of various newspapers on the map. Newspaper Map lets students examine how global events, such as the recent riots in Egypt or the vote in Sudan, are being covered in different parts of the world, as well as see how language and politics influence a story.

Newspaper Map

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BY BILL FERRIS

Are your students confused about filibusters and filibuster reform? Is that the most exciting lead sentence you’ve heard all year? If you answered “yes” to both questions, you should visit Filibustery (and get out more).

Filibustery is a multimedia project created by journalist Josh Kalven, formerly of Media Matters for America and Progress Illinois. Kalven bills Filibustery as, “a website launched in January 2011 with the goal of making the filibuster — and the proposals in the U.S. Senate to reform it — more understandable.”

As Kalven points out in the initial Filibustery video, most people associate the filibuster with an heroic James Steward in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, breaking out his coffee thermos and taking a stand on an important issue for hours on end. However, the tactic has increasingly been used as a routine tactic to defeat both large and small legislation, usually without ever employing the marathon, live-debate stage most people are familiar with. It’s a much more complicated process than I realized, but Kalven explains it with plain talk and helpful illustrations. Filibustery would be a helpful tool for a civics course talking about congressional procedure, or for anyone who wants a closer look at how the sausage gets made in Washington.

Filibustery

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Teaching about the Supreme Court? PBS has a set of interactives covering everything from the Court’s history to its role in everyday life. With this collection at your disposal, you can teach about almost any aspect of the Court. Want to show the symbolism behind the Supreme Court’s seal, its building, and the justices’ robes? There’s an activity for that. Or maybe your students would like to put themselves on the justices’ bench. There’s an interactive that presents the two sides of a classic case and lets them choose the winner.

There are nine activities in all, so your best bet is to take a look yourself. One of the most interesting is called “A Day in the Life.” It takes you through an average day at school, stopping along the way to ask questions about Supreme Court rulings that pertain to student life. You’ll see how the Court has ruled on issues like backpack searches and school internet censorship. Another one, “Supreme Inspiration,” is great for building cross-curricular connections to language arts. It highlights famous literature that was quoted in Supreme Court opinions. Writers like Plato, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and George Orwell have all made it into the justices’ writings; the activity explains how and in what context.

More broadly than teaching U.S. History, these activities have plenty of implications for Government and Civics, all centered on that document that’s gotten so much press lately: the Constitution.

Supreme Court History Interactives via PBS.org

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BY BILL FERRIS

Human history has long been documented in cartoon form. From the earliest cave paintings to today’s heavy-handed editorial cartoons, ink and paper (or cave walls) have recorded many of the watershed events in human history. Illustrator Jon White carries on this fine tradition at Today’s Document by making cartoons inspired by our country’s various historical happenings. White himself sums it up best:

“Our National Archives, here in Washington, DC, publishes a handy, educational RSS feed called “Today’s Document.” From those Documents, you’ll see me make drawings here. Some of them have cows.“

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Just because the presidential election is two years away, that doesn’t mean you have to wait around to get your students interested in presidential politics is the web-based game, eLections. Free to play and requiring only an internet connection, eLections takes you step by step through the presidential election process, from declaring candidacy to getting your party’s nomination to landing the most difficult job there is.

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Should animals have the same rights as people? Should the English-speaking world adopt American English? There are some topics on which everyone has an opinion. Offering a controversial debate question is a great way to energize your students and open their minds to multiple points of view.

Whether you want to have an impromptu class discussion or explore an issue in more depth, a pair of online resources can serve as starting points. Opposing Views is a veritable marketplace for all things debatable and The Economist is a news magazine with a debate section on its site. Both provide conflicting opinions from verified experts in a point-counterpoint format.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Everyone knows nuclear weapons are deadly. Ground Zero makes the destruction hit home, semi-literally.

This Google Maps mashup lets you see what would happen to your hometown (or another location of your choosing) if it was hit by various nuclear weapons. Pick your poison, which ranges from Fat Man and Little Boy to the Soviet Tsar Bomba, which caused the largest explosion ever. You can even look at the impact of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, proving that man is still no match for nature. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Let’s face it, unhealthy food options and a general lack of nutritional awareness have made childhood obesity a big issue in this country. In an effort to tackle the problem head-on, First Lady Michelle Obama has launched the aptly named Let’s Move. Part informational and part networking building, the site offers a wealth of nutrition and health information while trying to lay the foundation for a network of health-conscious citizens to work together to fight childhood obesity.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Like most children going through middle school and high school, I on occasion was shown one of those grainy black-and-white film on the day we had a sub. You know the ones, made during the good old days when the narrators talked in monotone, the music consisted of dramatic orchestra swells, and everyone wore suits or long dresses. Well, the good old days are back in full force with the government-funded FedFlix, an extensive archive of government-funded films made from back in the 1940s to the modern day.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Teaching students how our government works can be a dull subject — two houses, a president, a judicial branch, checks and balances, separation of church and state, we all had the same cookie-cutter run down. But how can we dig deeper than just the surface lessons about the folks we send to Washington D.C.? Well, the Library of Congress has created THOMAS, an online resource about the real goings-on of our government, named after out third president, which has an immense amount of information right down to the bills that were passed this week.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Growing up during the tail end of the Cold War, I heard the phrase “Be happy you don’t live in the U.S.S.R because…” many times in relation to things I felt were unfair. As a child you don’t really have an appreciation for the ways legal systems and governments work outside of the United States. Until I got to middle school I didn’t know what a parliament was outside of a brand of cigarettes.

To get a better sense of how the rest of the world works, the website JuriGlobe is an excellent resource you can point students to or reference yourself when they ask those gotcha questions in class like “Is Turkmenistan’s legal system based on a Common Law or Civilist model?”

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Need some global statistics to emphasize a point you’re trying to make in an ecology or civics lesson plan? Trying to drive home the point in a health-related lesson about the spread of disease or the scope of our ever-growing obesity epidemic? Then check out Worldometers, a real-time online ticker that tracks statistics ranging from food consumption, to energy use, to how much people spend on video games.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Given the polarized public opinion on the direction of American government, a game named Argument Wars seems like the perfect classroom activity to learn about the judicial branch of government. In this classroom game from Our Courts, students will argue both sides in several famous Supreme Court cases. According to the Our Courts website:

“In Argument Wars, you debate historical Supreme Court cases by advancing arguments and backing them up with supports. Play New Jersey v. T.L.O., Brown v. Board of Education, or Gideon v. Wainwright today! Coming soon: Texas v. Johnson, Miranda v. Arizona and more!”

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BY BILL FERRIS

The Lincoln Log has nothing to do with those fun wooden playsets you can build houses with. Instead, it’s “A daily chronology of the life of Abraham Lincoln.” Seeing as how Lincoln lived long before people could record the daily minutiae of their lives in blogs, the staff of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln combed through a lot of historical documents in order to find out what Honest Abe was up to on any particular day. In addition to a keyword search, you can search by date, year, or see what happened today in Lincoln’s life.

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