Synthesis Paper 4

            My WebQuest on Genocides throughout the 19^th century is one which is designed to help develop two important attributes a student in 2025 should hold, technologically savvy and being open-minded citizens of the world.  Being a WebQuest, the project is obviously almost entirely internet based.  Their research is coming from provided credible internet sources and they have the freedom to explore other sites for information as long as they recognize that they too are credible.  They will then get practice producing materials that will be published on the internet such as filming a movie and uploading it or creating a blog.  Finally the students will need to use their classmates posted information to type a paper summing up the whole project and what they took from it.  As the world shrinks from factors of globalization, it is also important the students become more accepting of differences.  It is intended that the students will realize that all these horrible acts are committed based on differences of believes, cultures, race and so on and start thinking about how just how negative discrimination can be. 

            This WebQuest very obviously relates to social justice because it educates the students on some of the most extreme cases of social injustice mankind has experienced over the last century.  They are then asked to reflect on how to prevent them in the future and why we as a society even allow them to continue in the first place.  It also is supposed to particularly reflex the ethics, equality and fairness portion of our classroom vision, as genocide would never be committed if humankind lived up to those standards.

            The aspect of this WebQuest that will be applying the NCSS 8 principle will be done through the final project, the “media awareness piece.”  This project will make them think about how technology has changed the spread of information.  It makes it available a much quicker rate than ever before and it can have massive effect on society.  While it may be used for negative reasons like affecting spread of private information, but it can also be used for good positive reasons such as spreading awareness for various events such as disease, natural disaster and of course, civil injustices occurring around the world.

            This WebQuest will also cover the NCSS 9 standard in many ways.  To study Genocide, one is taking part in studying conflict, peace (or lack thereof) and human rights issues, which are some of the main concepts of NCSS 9.  When one looks into the reasons of why or why not certain nations and/or groups like the UN involve themselves in an event similar to genocide it also gives insight on how global communication and economy works as well.