Flexibility is a Must

This post is a catch-up post from last week.

The College of Cardinals elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to be the 266th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church last Thursday. He took the name Pope Francis in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi. The election of the first Pope from Latin America played well into my unit on Latin America so I did a quick lesson plan change that morning and hoped for the best. I had each of my classes report to the Library Media Center for their scheduled blocks. I prepared a playlist of videos to show my students what was going on in the Vatican and to show them our new Latin American Pope. We talked about the significance of a non-European Pope, the significance of the name Francis, and our hopes for the church under new leadership. My students were buzzing with questions and I tried my best to answer them but there were a few that I just had to say I'd get back to them because I just didn't have an answer.

After our conversation about the Pope, I segued into current events and assigned each student a Latin American country and had them use the computers in the LMC to research one article regarding their country and to summarize or restate the information mimicking the form of "tweets" or short posts on the social networking site Twitter. They did not actually use Twitter but instead used Microsoft word to compose their "tweets" and then emailed their finished products to me. I value the skill of understanding concepts well enough to state them simply and I want to help my students hone in on it and use it not only in school but also in their lives in general. Using a social networking site that they are familiar with allows the students to use pre-exisisting framework in their minds and make accommodations for the new information they researched.