As the campaign for the White House continues to heat up, tonight's debate should make that clear, it might be a good idea to take a look back at how campaigns have evolved over the last sixty years. The Living Room Candidate is a great website shows visitors how political campaigns have evolved.
The Living Room Candidate is part of a larger project called the Museum of the Moving Image. Visitors to The Living Room Candidate can view the commercials from each campaign from both parties. A written transcript is provided with each commercial. Provided along with each video is an overview of the political landscape of at the time of the campaigns. Visitors to the website can search for commercials by election year, type of commercial, or by campaign issue.
Applications for Education
The Living Room Candidate has a great tool for students called The Living Room Candidate Ad Maker. The Ad Maker can be used by students to remix old advertisements, sound bites, and images to create new campaign commercials. The teachers page on The Living Room Candidate offers nine lesson plans for teaching about the historical context of campaigns, analyzing campaign ads, and creating new campaign ads.
The first debate between U.S. Presidential candidates is happening tonight at 9pm ET/ 6pm PT. Lifehacker has a list of all of the ways that you can watch the debate even if you don't have a cable/ satellite television. The debate should provide high school students with a good opportunity to learn more about the positions of both of the major candidates. The debate will also provide students with the opportunity to practice identifying positions, arguments, and logical fallacies.
If you're thinking about giving students the assignment to watch the debate tonight, consider asking them to watch with the purpose of trying to identify the candidates' positions on questions raised, their arguments or justifications for their positions, and any logical fallacies that either candidate uses. Your Logical Fallacy Is offers a convenient list of logical fallacies. Wireless Philosophy offers short video lessons on logical fallacies.
Students who choose to watch the debate online can use VideoNot.es or TurboNote to record time-stamped notes while watching the debate.
With the TurboNote Chrome extension installed your students can take notes while watching any video. To take notes students just need to click the TurboNote extension icon in their browsers and start writing notes in the menu that appears on the right side of the screen. Any notes that studetns type are automatically time-stamped. Notes can be edited while the video is playing or while the video is stopped. All notes can be shared via social media and email.
VideoNot.es is a great tool to connect to your Google Drive account. With VideoNot.es you can take notes on one side of your screen while watching a video on the other side. Your notes are automatically synchronized with the timestamps in the video. You can share your notes just like you share any other file within Google Drive. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how VideoNot.es works.
Earlier this year Google announced a move to make Android apps and other element of the Google Play store available on Chromebooks. The first opportunity to do this was in the beta version of Chrome OS on a couple of specific Chromebook models (the Acer R11 and Asus Flip). Late last week Google removed the need to run the beta version of Chrome OS.
Owners of Acer R11 and Asus Flip Chromebooks can now access the Google Play Store without having to use the beta version of Chrome OS. You can now run the stable, widely distributed Chrome OS and access the Google Play Store on your Chromebook.
The list of Android apps that can be used on a Chromebook as steadily expanded. That list can be seen on this Chrome Web Store page (note, the page only displays the apps if you are viewing it on a Chromebook).
Applications for Education
As the number of Android apps that can run on Chromebooks expands, we'll find that more students can quickly transition from using their Chromebooks at school to using the same apps on their personal devices. This could make it easier for students to continue working on a project as they can quickly transition from one device to the next.
