Day 2:
Day 2, when we’re in the computer lab, we were looking for real-world situations, real news articles. We looked at the mortgage crisis. We looked at child labor issues. We looked at a company that was manipulating its stock price. The students looked at these issues and they were real issues from the news. So, that relevance of this lesson is very important.

Day 2 is a 21st century technology day because we’re in the lab and we’re using the computers to search, using search terms, and then we also use them to produce the memos. We got a lot done that day, and the kids were under pressure. They had to do their research; they had to work as a team to decide what they were going to write in their memos; and they had to produce the memo and print it out all in one period. I broke the 50-minute period up into sessions, and warned them when they needed to move from their research into their writing and into their sort of finalization and printing and review of their product. I could see by watching over their shoulders how far they had gotten along, so I didn’t have a specific timeframe, although the curriculum recommends that it should take about 10 minutes or 15 minutes to do each activity. But if you know in general how long it’s going to take, then you can sort of watch and tell when your students are ready to move along. I also tried to introduce what the next activity was and to refocus them on what they needed to be doing at each moment during the period. The students were working under pressure. I was asking them to move along more quickly than we normally would have, and I think that they actually responded to that really well. The products that they turned out might have shown that pressure. They might have spent a little bit more time polishing the content of their memo, or reviewing the conventions and running it through spell check, but they got the work done on deadline, and that is a very important skill.