Technology Within Simulations

When I was doing my two week observation I got to see a Grade 12 History class preparing for a mock trial. As I looked into it further I found out that this teachers mock trials are legendary within the school. Kids request him as a teacher simply so they can take part in them. I also heard that students who can go an entire year in most classes without speaking regularly give passionate speeches during these trials. He sets it up each unit with putting a main player in that unit on trial. Everyone has a role and is forced to research all aspects of that event. For instance while I was there they were doing the Russian Revolution so they were preparing to put Stalin on trial. The whole thing seemed amazing.
What I thought was really neat though and super worthwhile for us was how he used the internet. He set each trial up on a blog page that the kids had access to. He put the outlines, resources, roles, and all other necessary aspects up there for the students to work off of. He also set up private rooms within the blogs where say only the defense lawyers could access in order to post and discuss information for the trial. It solved two major problems.
First the obvious it allowed kids to meet and share ideas from home without having to meet up. He said it had been a headache in the past trying to get kids to meet up outside of class time. This way there was no excuses they could all get to an internet source throughout the day and discuss what they wanted. It also gave them the ability to pass key information on that they wanted to other members of the trial, a key witness for instance.
the second thing it did and what I really thought was useful was allow him to see who was doing the work. It was made clear to the kids at the beginning of each trial that a huge portion of their mark would be made up by their effort and the amount they participated and contributed to their group. He said as with most group projects in the past it was tough to give everyone in a group the same mark when you were pretty sure a couple kids had just coasted along while others did all the work. What the blog did was allow him to go online and see how many times the kids had viewed the page, as well as how many times they had posted or commented on things. Then if one kid wanted to argue that they had participated he could pull up their stats and simply show them they had rarely been on the Blog and posted even less.
He did it all through the blog site on Google, but really had it dialed in and it was amazing to see. It also allowed the kids to really have a feeling of pride as they did so much of the work on their own and he could simply be there to guide them along and ask probing questions to get them thinking.