New AssignmentS: Bracketology and Judgment

Post date: Dec 6, 2013 7:08:43 PM

My first news assignments in a long, long time have been posted to the assignments page: Judgment and Bracketology! It gets harder and harder to find new ideas for activities as my list grows. I got the idea for Bracketology back in March while reading about a March Madness bracket. I figured why not do this with history terms? I finally got around to finishing the idea and I'm pretty happy with it.

The assignment is rather similar to Brain Chain (and will likely replace it on my wall) but has it's own unique flavor as well. Students select 8 terms from the unit and set them up in a versus bracket. For each pair students choose the more important term and write an explanation of why that term is more important. This forces them to use higher order thinking skills like comparing and evaluating. I haven't tested this with students yet but I'm eager to do so soon. Let me know if you do and how it works out!

Judgment came as an off-shoot of the Bloom Ball. I was brainstorming ideas for the "Judge" panel and came up with this. It proved to be too lengthy to work there but I think it will work well as it's own thing. I love anything that is short, simple and full of higher order thinking skills (H.O.T.S. for the buzzword searches!) and this does it well.

For those interested I've got a few more activities in the pipeline including Create a Superhero and Design a Playset. I have no idea when the next step of inspiration will strike and give me what I need to finish them but just having the ideas up there floating is the first step!