Ms. Q: Election '08

Essential Question:
How do character, choice, and change influence democracy?

Unit Questions:
1. Why is the electoral process important?
2. How do presidential candidates convince others to vote for them?
3. What defines a person’s character?

Content Questions:
1. How does a political candidate choose their issues?
2. How does a political candidate persuade the public to vote for them?
3. What is the author's purpose in this candidate's article?
4. Is this article based more on fact or opinion? Support answer.
5. What are four of the issues the public wants addressed?
6. What is the stance of your candidate on these four issues?

Outcomes:
1. Students will plan a presidential candidate’s campaign.
2. Students will research the issues surrounding the election of 2008 in order to write a one-stop fact sheet on the issue.
3. Students will investigate various articles on presidential candidates.
4. Students will analyze the candidate's position on essential issues.
5. Students will create a blog for their candidate and write daily/weekly entries on issues and events.
6. Students will demonstrate understanding of their political candidate by producing a blog, wiki, and commercial for a campaign.
7. Students will collaborate with other "advisors" to plan a debate of the issues.
8. Students will debate the issues as candidates.
9. Students will simulate a town hall meeting.
10. Students will create and assess a work plan.

Pre-Assessment:
The pre-assessment will likely consist of key terms and people and questions about the electoral process. This will give me an idea of how much electoral process content will needed to be covered before moving into the actual project.

I will also need to assess student familiarity and functionality with blogs/wikis/research/etc.

Notes:
Students will be in groups. These groups will become the advisors/campaign managers for the candidates. These groups will study their candidate, plan to emulate the candidate in debates and speeches, create blogs/wikis for candidates major issues, research the major issues, and more.

I want this to be a year long project. One students build on as the year goes by and one in which the final products will be of stellar quality. One of my ideas for the end of the year is to have an actual election occur on campus.

To introduce the project (without actually letting the kids know of the project yet) I plan to show them pics of the candidates and have them write what they know about candidate, who they would vote for at this moment in time, and why they would choose this person.

We will explore candidate’s blogs and analyze use of the blogs and the design of blogs to determine why they are designed to do what they do.

This is what I have so far.