In this unit, students will produce two major pieces of work.  The first piece is an argument essay that grapples with one of the core questions of the unit: who are we, and who have we become because of the ways we connect? Students will read, annotate, and discuss several texts together as they consider the issues surrounding this question, and they will also research and annotate independently as they search for more evidence and perspectives to help deepen their ideas.  They will also create a museum exhibit as part of a team.  The exhibit project will help students identify what's worth preserving about their unique place in history.

PROJECT UNITS

This project unit continues to meet the English Language Arts standards as it also utilizes the learning principles established by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. It is designed to support deep content knowledge and perseverance through long-term project planning and implementation. In addition, it will help students to recognize, develop, and apply the planning, teamwork, communication, and presentation skills they will use while presenting a final product to their class and/or the greater community. This real-world project-based activity will give students an opportunity to apply the skills they have been learning all year and will guide them to develop the motivation, knowledge, and skills they need in order to be college and career ready.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students write an argument paper where they develop a claim about current culture as it has been influenced by digital connectivity.
Students participate in a group project to create a museum exhibit that captures a unique place, time, and relationship to technology. Students acknowledge the differing perspectives of each group member and use those perspectives to synthesize one cohesive visual argument together.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

What does it mean to be digitally connected?
What are the implications of living in a world where everyone is digitally connected?
How does the availability of instant connectivity shape our relationships?
What does our Internet use reveal about people's needs as humans?

BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT: Cold Read

During this unit, on a day of your choosing, we recommend you administer a Cold Read to assess students’ reading comprehension. For this assessment, students read a text they have never seen before and then respond to multiple-choice and constructed-response questions. The assessment is not included in this course materials.

In this lesson, you will share the perspective you gained by interviewing your Digital Immigrant. You'll also hear about the perspectives other students gained and workshop the introduction of your essay.In this lesson, students will share the perspective they gained by interviewing their Digital Immigrant. They'll also hear about the perspectives other students gained and workshop the introduction of their essay.

Examine facts and figures on how teens use the Internet in this infographic from FRONTLINE: Generation Like. Ninety-five percent of teens use the Internet. The infographic details which forms of technology they use to access the Internet, which sites they use, what they do when they're online, and whether they care about privacy.

A rich Fordham University site of primary source material that include full-text, and multimedia sites. There are additional study and research guides such as Modern History in the Movies.

This Fordham University site provides links to various documents that pertain to the French Revolution. (Note: a lot of the content is in French.)

Collection of primary sources that supports study of imperialism. Sources include contemporary narrative accounts, letters, memoirs, songs, newspaper reports, and a variety of legal, cultural, philosophical, religious, and scientific documents.

In this activity, students will use a tutorial on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's website to learn about how surface water is treated to make it safe to drink.

Many people that use the internet seem to be more willing to give out personal information than they would in other settings. This can be very dangerous. This resource describes how to protect your privacy while using the internet.

Firewall software forms the first line of defense against hackers and certain types of computer viruses. This site explains what a firewall can do to help secure a computer and what it cannot do. The site also discusses different types of firewalls and provides some installation and maintenance tips.

This nonprofit organization creates structured projects that facilitate engaged learning and youth making a difference on an International scale. Project areas include interdisciplinary topics such as the environment/science, art/literature, and social studies/politics. Some examples of past projects are the Holocaust/Genocide, the Building Wells for Clean Water in Nicaragua, and the Planetary Notions, an environmental newsletter.

Information about the File Transfer Protocol, and how it is used to transfer files.

Sharpen your skills with these Search Challenges. Test your strategies and tactics as you attempt to solve puzzling Internet research problems efficiently and effectively. Choose from multi-leveled games that feature various themes including soccer. Need more challenges? Search Challenge Archive.

This site from the Internet Grammar of English of the University College of London provides a general overview of sentence structure. Content includes an online exercise, and is worth checking out on the subject.

Multiple text versions of all of Shakespeare's works, including Folio, Quarto, and/or modern versions of some (Click on "A full list of the plays and poems, in their various versions"). Part of a larger site about Shakespeare containing a variety of information about him and his work.

A brief overview of women writers during the English Renaissance. Related links to different writers.

This collection of instructional videos analyzes how the internet has created a system for everyone to engag.

Students learn about complex networks and how to use graphs to represent them. They also learn that graph theory is a useful part of mathematics for studying complex networks in diverse applications of science and engineering, including neural networks in the brain, biochemical reaction networks in cells, communication networks, such as the internet, and social networks. Students are also introduced to random processes on networks. An illustrative example shows how a random process can be used to represent the spread of an infectious disease, such as the flu, on a social network of students, and demonstrates how scientists and engineers use mathematics and computers to model and simulate random processes on complex networks for the purposes of learning more about our world and creating solutions to improve our health, happiness and safety.

A complete transcript outlining the court case between Janet Reno, U.S. Attorney General, and the American Civil Liberties Union, in which the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional.

This unit teaches students how to become a wise consumer. Some of the topics discussed are income, budgeting, credit, saving, and loans. Five different activities include objectives, worksheets, evaluations, and resources.

This article from the Fordham University describes nationalism and its political force in the 19th century. Includes a variety of multimedia links.