Teaching the Students Webquest

Dr. Benavides gave me some great ideas to work with the students. The first was Webquests. Every one of my students had no clue what it was and each student very surprised that the internet contained educational ideas as such. So as I introduced it each one felt that it was something that they really enjoyed.
I am currently in the French Revolution unit. I wasn't able to go outside the box as such yet because of testing for their six period. But now that they got a taste of what a webquest does and how it works I will have each student create their own Webquest for the next unit. I should say that the next unit is going to be the Industrial Revolution. This unit contains inventions from all over the world. This will give me the opportunity to have each students research and create from different world perspectives. I'm very excited. I briefly shared with the students my ideas of their next project and I could see the wheels turning in them. And I must say that was very exciting too!
One of my compadres in the MAT was wondering about movies, other technology and maybe uses other students from different countries as pen pals. Great suggest that Dr. Benavides already has in store for me. I glad to read that we are on the same page. I also have a conference that I'm going to that teaches us how to podcast and for student to do the same in the classroom. I'm really looking forward to it.

A Fresh Start with World History

At the beginning of the school year I had quit a few challenges to look forward to. Let me back up, I've been teaching World History at Tulare Union High School for about five years. During that time of teaching I have been getting lethargic with my methods. I figured there had to be something better than the same redundant year after year methods of teaching.
One thing I do know is that students love technology. They love their ipods, lap tops, and above all else their cell phones.
The content of my action research is going to be introducing Multicultural curriculum into a World History classroom utilizing Technology. My question is, “Is there multicultural curriculum of technology for a World History class?”
I decided to research this particular question because after teaching World History for five years I was beginning to notice a westernized view of World History. Everything was from the perspective of how history was interpreted though European American eyes and books. It almost seemed as though world history revolved mostly around the United States or Europe. The reality of world history is that western civilization only existed and dominated for only about 600 years. China and Persia have been at the fore front of domination for thousands of years prior. And a little secret us historians know is that is about twenty years China will be dominant once again. If we didn’t notice how dominant China was at the Olympics, we missed the biggest story.
My research is related to this so we can see how the rest of the world views world history. We have so many different races and ethnicity's in our classroom that we as historians will often sell our students short of their own cultural identity if we don’t teach the students to look through their own eyes, rather than a Euro-American’s eye’s. I believe this is vital for teaching. I have found multiple lessons looking at America from a minority point of view but I have not found as much looking at Europe, Africa, Asia or Southeast Asia historically. Basically I'm a Mexican guy trying to see how my culture would view Europeans, Africans, Asians and Southeast Asian historically. I hope that makes sense...
This will dramatically change the was I teach if I could figure out how to utilize technology with the students. I believe that students would be more engaged if they could visualize history through their culture's eye's. Whether the student is Portuguese(which there are a lot of), Danish, Canadian, and all the rest. I believe it would be intriguing.