Structurally my course so far looks sound; however there seems to be a lot left for me to fill in. I am not happy with many of my activities as of yet and don’t believe I have as yet set the course up sufficient scaffolding or even clear instructions for the final and culminating project.

Basically, my course is its title “Ancient Civilizations”. I changed the title from the Global History and Geography I because I had to cut much of the geography out because of schedule and structural concerns. We will study ancient civilizations throughout the course, while doing regents based assessments and working with power point projects. The final project will be a virtual tour of an ancient civilization we have studied using power point and there will also be a short, but regents based final exam. What I want to make sure of is that I am properly preparing my course so that it offers enough opportunities throughout to prepare for this final project.

From viewing the course I believe I am preparing well enough for my students to take a regents based exam. The course is full a multiple choice questions, thematic outlines and document based questions and essays. Preparing them to use power point is another story. From looking at my course I have one power point exercise planned before the final project and it is too difficult for a scaffolding exercise.  My plan is to borrow an idea from Joe and have the icebreaker introduction be a power point exercise in which the students create one slide as an introduction piece about themselves. We can then combine it into one large power point for a class collage.

So far I am satisfied, but still want to do a great deal more work. I may change the course so that I can focus on using a class wiki. The wiki would probably be a class thing in which students would contribute and edit pages based on what ever theme we are covering in class. I have not worked out the details obviously, so the wiki is not in the near future. The rest I wish to do is just consolidate and possibly shortening the class by two modules. Most of all though I want to make sure my instructions are clear and that my class activities are clearly tied together.