More please... what's on your mind?

Elections in Tunisia (after 55 years of one-party rule), earthquake in Turkey, death of a dictator, flooding in Thailand... so much going on, and almost all of it has a connection to what we are learning about in school. I'd like you to investigate the "Occupy the World" movement that started on Wall Street in New York and has spread to many cities, including Prince George. On the surface, it seems to be about people's disgust for corporate greed. Search for "occupy" and "wall street" or "vancouver" etc. CBC has a map of other cities where this protest movement has spread. Why did it start? What are the protesters' issues? What do they want? How is the "movement" different from city to city? What is the role for social media like facebook and twitter? What impact do you think the "occupy" protests will have? Does this have anything in common with the Arab Spring protests last year that brought down the Tunisian and Egyptian governments and led to a revolution in Libya? Answer 2 or 3 of these questions in a comment.

Family History Research

Whether for a class Heritage project or for your own interest, you may want to investigate some of these "genealogy" sites:
Rootsweb engine http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi search existing family trees
Rootsweb http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/  research tools, free portion of ancestry.com
Canadian Letters and Images http://www.canadianletters.ca/ online archive of the Canadian war experience
Family Search https://www.familysearch.org/  free family history and genealogy records
Canada GenWeb http://www.canadagenweb.org/ check out the provincial pages, too
please let me know in a comment if you find other useful sites, I'll add them

What's on your mind?

Pic: Gadhafi captured and killed. SS10 students... some of you have been looking into current events and have found some interesting stories. Maybe you have other questions about Canada or society. Leave your thoughts as a comment, if you wish. If you have a news item, please leave a link, too.

Geography 12 Tectonics & Waffles

What a great way to wrap up our unit on earth structure, geology, plate tectonics, faults/folds, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Nick and Nick served up waffles for the class, using each one to demonstrate some kind of plate boundary or fault type before their classmates devoured them. After all of the lessons, slideshows, reading, videos, quizzes, and demos in out unit, we've had some fantastic presentations that fulfilled three criteria: deepen our understanding of selected learning outcomes from the unit, reflect the interest & talents of the student as applied to meaningful inquiry, and embody learning in some way -- voice, performance, demonstration, physical construction, etc. Today was a small feast celebrating learning with great waffles! Thanks, class -- engaging presentations so far, and 2 more to come...