Student+Audience

The castle unit is being taught in a medium-sized 6-8 middle school. The sixth grade history class has twenty-two students. As the school rests in a more rural setting, this particular unit is actually being taught in the school computer lab. Most of them have little background with medieval history aside from what they have read/seen in fantasy novels or movies. They are willing to learn, provided the lesson stimulates them. Otherwise, they can easily be distracted by cell phone games or random browsing on the Internet. For information literacy, it has been noted that this group tends to just believe whatever the teachers say. They assume the knowledge is correct, and will simply add new information to old. The media specialists need a starting point for information evaluation. For this unit, that is simply to take a virtual tour that the students control. They cannot be passive learners anymore. It is the hope that in the real world, the students will realize they can look through information as deeply as they want.

The knight unit is being taught in the same school system, in the medium sized high school. The eleventh grade history class has twenty students. As this group has more experience with both Internet research and independent work, the small computer lab in the media center itself is the lesson site. Also, this helps the media specialist be nearby at all times. Most of their prior knowledge with this unit would come from movies like //First Knight//, and as such there will be the need to separate Hollywood ‘facts’ and historical facts. This group understands the difference between a good and bad source, but is not very experienced in determining the two. This impacts the approach of the lesson by giving them a very direct topic to search for the first part of the project. This small but straight path will keep the evaluation portion within student capability. This age group also demands for lessons to be relevant, so by having them bring a knight into the modern day and be exposed to the student’s own world, they MAKE the lesson relevant themselves. It will be interesting to see if a fictional character a student creates actually provides a brand new viewpoint of the modern culture.