This past unit in humanities has been centred around The Second World War. It was definitely one fo the more interesting units that I have ever done, as there was so much information packed into such small period of time. We were told that our end product was going to be a website. The website would be about the different perspectives of WWII, the persepectives would come from the view of each country. There was several different options to do your reasearch in a group on country’s who played major roles in the war but, if you wanted to you could go on your own and do reasearch on a country that wasnt on the list. I requested to do my reasearch on Canada, I now regret that decision as I already knew quite a bit about Canadas involvement in the war and I think it would have been a better decision to learn about another country.
Besides making the website, we learned about the war in general and all fo the battles. One of the most interesting battles that we focused on was Dunkirk. In the evacutation of Dunkirk, the German Forces had backed the French up against the English Channel. The French were completley surrounded with nowhere to go. The british decided to do an evacuation by sea. The rounded up basically every boat that could go through the English Channel. There were hundreds of boats from pleasure crafts to ferrrys and even fishing boats. Two days after the evacuation started the Luftwaffe bombed the port of Dunkirk, whihc made the evacuation much more difficult. On June 4th, 1940 the evacuation was completed after saving 340,000 people, which was much more than they thought they could ever achieve. ALthough the evacuation was succesful, France surrendered to Germany on the 22nd of June.
Another thing we did was do a book review on one of three books we had to choose form that involved World War 2. I made a blog post on that not too long ago here it is.
One of the more intersting portions of this unit was the fact that our class got to interview a German War Veteran. It was so cool to just meet one in general but getting to talk to him about his expierence was completley unreal. The person we interviewed was is Helmut Lemke, as I said he is a War Veteran that fought for Germany, he fought on the eastern front against the USSR. Helmut is also involved with this program called the Historica Memory Project. It was definitely one of the coolest things I have ever done, after we interviewed him we each took a piece of the recording we took of him and made a small podcast out of it.
One of the more boring parts of this unit was learning how to cite videos, websites, and books. It was mandatory as we needed to do it properly on our website. Which now brings me to how we created our website. We used Weebly to make the website as our teacher thought that was the best way to do it as she had created websites previously with Weebly. We later found out that Weebly is super glitchy to use on an iPad, so ended up doing basically on our iPads and then sending it to a computer where we put the info into the website. My group and I evenly split up the work of the website where each one of us would do two pages or so, as there were three of us and we needed to do somewhere around six pages. Instead of me explaining what we did for each individual page I will just show you what we did.
This unit was one of my favourites and I really enjoyed doing the research on my country, as I found some very interesting information that I would not have found if I didn’t do this unit. I don’t know if I would change anything except maybe explore different website builders for the iPad as Weebly was not ideal. As I said before this was one of the most interesting and engaging units I have ever done. I feel that I have learned a lot from this unit not just in what happened but, I feel that I view the world a bit differently. One of the main things that has changed my worldview was Helmut Lemke, and I quote “No one wins a war”. That single phrase completley changed how I thought about war, because he was completley right, no one does win a war, every country involved lost something. WWII caused every country that fought in it to lose lives, either civilians or soldiers. That was the biggest thing that I took away from this unit.
I like the photos that you used when you mentioned the different battles.
There were a couple typos. You should also talk about the process of making the website as well as the presentation with Kathleen Barter. Another thing that would make the post better is to link to the other people in your group.
The amount of links in this post is amazing