The Three Gorges Dam Activity: For Teachers

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The Three Gorges Dam Activity: For Teachers

Objectives

If you visit the Objectives Page, you can see that we have listed 5 objectives:

Find information about the area that would be affected by the dam
Determine the benefits of a dam for the Chinese government and China in general
Determine the negative impact that the dam would have
Make a decision either in favor or against the so-called "Three Gorges Dam Project"
Use HTML to create a webpage displaying your findings-- we will select one student-made website as the winner

All of these objectives were designed with the goal of having students create an integrative solution to the problem in mind. Not only must they research the history and facts about the dam, students must also carefully weigh the pros and cons involved. The creators of this site wish to stress that as students begin to tackle more "advanced" and realistic problems, there cannot be one "right answer." As long as a student can clearly articulate his or her stance on the issue and defend it just as clearly, the goal of this exercise will have been accomplished.

Another important purpose of this activity is to teach students about both the power and the potential for danger that the internet possesses as a research tool. Just as there are a lot of quality sites floating around out there on the World Wide Web, there are at least an equal number of not-so-quality sites. The discerning internet user should be able to decide whether a source can be "trusted" implicitly--and whether it must be taken "with a grain of salt." With the explosion of reference and information-rich sites on the web, these skills are becoming more and more important.

In addition, students learn the skill of presentation. The internet is filled with colorful, flashing gimmicks, animated logos, sound files, etc., all designed to catch the passing web surfer's fickle attention for a brief instant. In this sort of a medium, awareness of layout, color, and balance of text and images is very important for a website's success. Also, students are taught the importance of citing sources--the internet facilitates plagiarism due to the ease of "copy-pasting" directly from a webpage into a report. Students must learn that this is unacceptable and that credit must be given where it is due.

Finally, this activity stresses basic internet literacy. By successfully completing the tutorial, students learn the following skills:

Ability to use key-word searches for finding information
Ability to send email (for citation purposes)
Ability to retrieve electronic information
Ability to create hypertext documents (webpages)

The following is taken from the State of Virginia's Technology Standards of Learning (SOL) (http://www.pen.k12.va.us/go/Sols/his tory.html) for the 8th grade. Notice that we have tried as much as possible to cover all the objectives dealing with internet usage




C/T8.2    The student will communicate through networks and

          telecommunication.

          *  Use local and worldwide network communication systems.

          *  Develop hypermedia - home page - documents that can be

             accessed by worldwide networks.



C/T8.4    The student will process, store, retrieve, and transmit

          electronic information.

          *  Use search strategies to retrieve electronic

             information.

          *  Use electronic encyclopedias, almanacs, indexes, and

             catalogs to retrieve and select relevant information.

          *  Use laser discs with a computer in an interactive mode.

          *  Use local and wide-area networks and modem-delivered

             services to access and retrieve information from

             electronic databases.

          *  Use databases to perform research.

In addition, the Virginia SOLs define geography instruction as follows:


"The goal of geography instruction is to provide an understanding of

the human and physical characteristics of the earth's places and

regions, how people of different cultural backgrounds interact with

their environment, and how the United States and the student's home

community are affected by conditions and events in distant places. 

Geographic themes include location, place, human environment,

movement, and region."



                       --http://www.pen.k12.va.us/go/Sols/history.html

By choosing the Three Gorges Dam scenario it was our intention to try and address as many of the geography stipulations as possible. Geography cannot be thought of as merely the memorization of countries and their capitals, as shown by the geography SOLs. Instead, it is the study of the relationships between geographic location, culture, peoples, etc. and must be studied integratively with other disciplines. In the Three Gorges Dam scenario, students must look at the problem from many different angles in order to successfully defend a solution.

Classroom Implementation Suggestions

The Three Gorges Dam scenario is perfect for classroom implementation for several reasons:

The activity was designed specifically to apply to a wide range of grade levels. Whether a student is in 6th grade or in college, he or she can still benefit from the activity and produce unique solutions to the problem
The site can be accessed from anywhere (home or school)
It would fit in with any classroom study of geography, world issues, or current events
It would fit in with any classroom study of technology, web design, or the internet
It includes several small tests which can be used for quantitative assessment of progress
Students are given several opportunities to "leave their mark" on the site: they can win the "Best Webpage" award, submit helpful links, add themselves to the global database of students, or participate in the ongoing message board discussion. All these options could potentially help with evaluation of participation

There are several potential ways to implement the Three Gorges activity into your course. Of course the optimal method is to have each student work individually on his or her own webpage; however, it is understandable that there are often limitations on the number of computers available to students. The activity would also work well for students in small groups. Usually the difficulty with group work is that one or two people shoulder most of the burden while the others perhaps don't contribute their share. However, with the Three Gorges Dam scenario, this problem can be avoided by having each person in the group write a different page of the finished product. That way all the members can benefit equally from the activity. If lack of computers is still a concern, encouraging students to use offline resources is an excellent idea. The reason print materials such as periodicals and encyclopedias are not stressed in the Three Gorges activity is because we wanted our main emphasis to be on new technology; however, more "traditional" sources can prove to be just as helpful as websites when researching a problem.

Evaluation of the finished webpages should be rather painless as well. Either you as the teacher could look through the sites and assign grades based on fulfillment of the objectives outlined above, or the students themselves could engage in peer review; simply have each of the student's (or group of students') webpages on the screen and have the class cycle around and look for certain key elements such as focus, clarity, persuasiveness, etc. For more quantitative evaluations, there are two reading quizzes located Here that give percentage scores. In addition, there are several optional items on the site that could be used as extra credit: these include the ability to submit links, be added to the global database, submit a comment on the message board, and be judged to have the best webpage about the Three Gorges Dam. All of these options do credit individual students (as long as they choose to write their names) so it would be simple enough to check the site and confirm whether a student truly did submit an idea to the message board, for instance.

For more ideas or questions about how to implement this site into your curriculum, please email us.