Social Action and Communication

Social Action Related Websites:

1. http://www.takepart.com/ This site is best for 7-12th graders. Students can research current issues and participate in taking action. This could also be a good resource for highlighting controversial current events in a social studies course, or to find negative affects of recent historical events. This website also provides an application for students to tweet info from the website easily to help make an issue more well known.

2. http://www.blogger.com This site is best for 6-12th graders. Students can use it to gain readers and publish content that they can care about. They can also share the website with their friends and relatives to be shared out further to gain a larger audience. This site could also be used for teachers to keep students and parents up to date with what's going on in the class. Also, it could be used to gather interested parties and forward them to a more direct form of action such as a link to a petition, survey, or school project.

3. http://socialactions.com/ This site is best for 10-12th graders. They can use it to find petitions that are relevant to topics of interest, and follow the petitions to the original website to learn more. they can also use it to meet other people who share the same interests and work together to effect changes. Teachers can use it to encourage their students to get involved in things they care about and to meet other people to discuss the topics learn other peoples points of view, and effect change.

Communication Skills Related Websites:
1. http://www.essortment.com/all/communicationte_rqmd.htm This site is good to use with 6-11th graders. It contains great ideas for activities to teach students good communication skills without the students getting defensive about already knowing how to communicate.


2. http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/08/12/rs.how.to.think.on.feet/index.html This site is best for 8-12th graders. The information within can be used to create a fun activity in which students learn and practice how to think fast and improve their communication skills.

3. http://www.podomatic.com This site is best for 10-12th graders. It can be used to create podcasts for students to listen to later, or it can be used to have students create their own podcasts to share with the class or the world. When time is tight it can also be used for recording student foreign language oral presentations in a lab where the teacher can monitor that they aren't reading off of something. It can also be used for students to create advertisements, how-to-podcasts, and messages about a cause they want to share.