Two Projects

 Today's Learning Objectives  * Know the life and teachings of the Buddha. * Explain the major beliefs and practice of the religion of Hinduism. * Include multimedia components (e.g., graphics, images, music, sound) and visual displays in presentations to clarify information. 

How Do I Know You're Learning?  As many of you know, teachers are required to teach and students are supposed to learn certain standards or learning objectives. Two standards that we've recently covered, and which you often see displayed prominently on our Blog (like today), relate to the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, which we have been studying for nearly over a month now. How do I know if you learned what you were supposed to have learned? Well, I can assess you in a variety of different ways, including multiple choice exams, short answer responses, and written essays. However, for these two learning objectives, it was decided that you would demonstrate what you learned through the completion of two projects. Let's briefly review them.  

The Buddha Comic Strip  In order to demonstrate that you clearly understood the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, as required by our Social Studies standards, you were tasked with designing a digital comic strip that chronologically tells the story of the central events in his life.

To begin, we studied the life of Buddha using a variety of source materials. You synthesized what you learned form these multiple sources by taking notes using the document Important Events in the Life of Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha). Next, you mapped out your plan for your comic by completing a Buddha Comic Strip Story Board. Finally, once you had your story board complete you were ready to digitally design your comic using the online program ToonDoo.

Meanwhile, you were provided with the Life of Buddha Comic Strip Rubric, which explains the various criteria you are supposed to meet in order for your comic to be considered of 'Proficient' quality and to help me assess your level of understanding of the learning objective.

If you have not yet completed this project, I would like you to make finishing it your priority today. 

The Hinduism and Buddhism Video  For our most recent project, you have been using a program called WeVideo to combine images, text, and music together to produce a video that demonstrates both your understanding of the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. This project serves as the final assessment for our unit on ancient India.

Before your movie got “green-lighted,” you needed to produce a script or screenplay (Hinduism and Buddhism - WeVideo Script) which served as your plan for the ideas and concepts you wanted to focus on in your film. In writing your script, you relied on a multitude of sources, including the work you did on your  Hinduism Study Guide (A Central Idea and Its Parts), Buddhism Study Guide (A Central Idea and Its Parts), and Buddhism and Hinduism - Venn diagram, as well as previous Social Studies Blog posts, and your Ancient Civilizations textbook.   

The Hinduism and Buddhism Video Rubric, featured below, makes it clear the criteria that need to be met in order to demonstrate Proficiency.

If you have already completed your Buddha Comic Strip, please make working on the Hinduism and Buddhism Video project your major focus today. 

Project Showcase  Towards the end of class today, I would like to dedicate time to showcasing some of the extraordinary work that many of you have been doing on both of these two projects. As our unit on ancient India comes to a close, it's time to reflect on all we've learned together and to celebrate your success.