Demographics, Day 1 - Class Recap

A Vietnamese man and his son, in the streets of Hanoi, 2011.

Hi everyone,

A lot of work today, with the start of our new unit on demographics! We also reviewed the religion test and then went to the Computer Lab. Here's what we did today in class:

Learning Targets: 
Knowledge LT 10: I can explain demographic changes in the world and their effects.
Critical Thinking LT 2: I can explain connections between events, issues, problems and concepts.

Soundtrack: "Ordinary People" by John Legend. Selected for today because demographics is the statistical study of people. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 5/7/15:

News Brief – Natalie
Religion Test
Demographics
Computer Lab S220

Homework: Read the blog! Finish your one column (all four pages) of data for the country on the demographics profile. If you have not turned in your Historical Investigation, please do so immediately - I would especially just like to see Part A/the research question paragraph if you have not turned it in. The last day to turn anything related to the Historical Investigation in is next Friday, May 15. Next news brief: Alyssa.

---

News Brief: Natalie had the news brief today and selected an article about this story to talk about: CNN.com - Hangar of Japan's aircraft carrier sub found. Natalie was a bit late, so I started class with this article: CNN.com - Exclusive: North Korea would use nukes if 'forced,' official says. There is always lots happening around the world! Plus, we noted that President Obama is visiting

We also watched VICE News for the day, before moving on.

The next news brief was assigned to Alyssa.

Religion Test: I switched this up a bit, because there were multiple students that needed to do the test. In any case, after they were out taking the test, I went over the results with the rest of the class, by passing back the scantrons and reviewing the answers as a class. I also talked about the short answer question on the back, and how I used that as another opportunity to show proficiency on Critical Thinking LT 2 (another historical investigation target). Then, I collected the tests back, before moving on to the next section.

Demographics: Our next unit is on demographics, which we started learning a little bit about last class. Today, we went into more depth, starting with watching another introductory video about the power of demographics and statistics:

After the video, I passed out this assignment, which we did today in the Computer Lab:

Google Drive: Demographics Development Indicators

To get the information needed to complete this (I asked students to just split the columns up for people to work on, like one person taking the United States), students needed to find the statistics for countries on the CIA World Factbook (some of the statistics might be found from other sources, too).

Computer Lab S220: The rest of the class was spent working on finding different development statistics on the US, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip in the Computer Lab. Again, please have one full column (all four pages) completed for next class, when I will provide some time to finish (not in the computer lab) before we discuss the data and what it means.

Thanks for your continued hard work! Keep working on getting your grades up, if at all possible! :-)