Human Geography Cornerstone Assessment Infuses #EdTech for @BullisSchool Students to #DemonstrateUnderstanding @Weebly @Flipgrid

We are getting close to the end of the school year and, to keep with tradition, I wanted to showcase some highlights from the Megacity Project all of our 9th grade Human Geography complete as their capstone project for the course. This course is taught by a team of three teachers, Ben Mosteller, Allison Ewing, and Kristin Kowalew.

To recap the project, Ben Mosteller wrote up the following details:

In the final unit of the course, students learn about urban land use and all of the complexities that come with the growth and sustainability of a city. They are assigned a megacity (a city whose metro area has at least 10 million residents) to research in depth. The essential question that drives the research project is “How has your megacity transformed the site (physical area) and situation (social, economic, political and cultural framework) of its area over time, and how will this impact the lives of its inhabitants in the next 50 years?” Students compile their research and showcase it on a website. Each tab of the website represents a different area of study from the course — from population and migration to cultural characteristics to environmental issues and how the leaders are addressing them. This intensive, 4-week project develops the following skills in our students: identifying reliable sources, taking notes, paraphrasing information, outlining and drafting content for the final product, locating copyright free images and non-text items for the final product, citing information and images, giving and using peer and teacher feedback to make revisions, and creating an annotated bibliography to summarize and evaluate sources.

To highlight some of the exemplary websites from this year, we asked students to record project reflections to a Flipgrid. To create a visual celebration of these projects, we decided to poster print the grid and add QR codes linked to the students’ website to display in the hall.

If you’re interested in seeing how we have tweaked things over the years, check out these links to writeups of the Megacity Project from past classes: