Reflections on Bataan: Slideshow maker

This lesson encourages the student to reflect and summarize lessons learned while exploring the Battle for Bataan Web site. Now it's the students' turn to analyze, synthesize, and present their conceptualizations in a slideshow so others may learn and benefit from their perspectives and insights. This format encourages students to:

• Express and investigate unanswered questions, and
• Expand on points they found noteworthy.

• Interpret events and issues based on the historical, economic, political, social, and geographic context of the participants (SS I-D, 9-12:4).
• Use the problem solving process to identify a problem; gather information, suggest solutions, list and consider advantages and disadvantages of solutions, choose and implement a solution, and evaluate the effectiveness of the solution using technology to present findings (SS I-D, 5-8:7-2).

• Reflect on the ordeal of the men of the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery units between 1940 and 1945 and organize their thoughts around a central theme, concept, or lesson learned (lesson could be learned by the nation, survivors, or students).
• Review the Artifact database, Timeline, slideshows, and videos in Battle for Bataan to collect photographs, letters, documents, newspapers, maps, drawings, and folk art images that support their central theme or lesson.
• Extend their research on this theme with scholarly investigative searches of resources from the Internet, libraries, and personal and family contacts.
• Use artistic creativity to develop a historic presentation on their theme.
• Present theme to the class with the New Mexico Times Slideshow Maker.

New Mexico Times Slideshow Maker
Web sites for research
Word processing program to develop assessment tool
Computer-projection device

Online resources

National Archives (www.archives.gov/)
Library of Congress American Memory Project (http://memory.loc.gov/)
Other Web pages from Resources section of Curriculum Resources

1. Review Bataan videos and slideshows as needed to refresh students on material.
2. Introduce lesson in a class discussion as a hands-on culmination of the exploration of the Bataan ordeal. Discussion should include:
   • how to select a central organizing principal (theme or lesson learned from Battle for Bataan),
   • how to support that principal with evidence, and
   • purpose in creating slideshow and audience for the slideshow.
3. Encourage students to collaborate in learning to use the slideshow maker.
4. Facilitate a discussion to develop the assessment rubric (see Assessment, below).
5. Students create individual slideshows. Allow time for draft reviews by peers.

Presentation
Student presentations may be shown to the class or to a wider audience (other classes, community and/or veterans' organization) as appropriate.

Resources
Creating Slideshows
http://www.tki.org.nz/r/ict/ideas/slides_e.php
A teacher resource describing how students could create slideshows for other students, parents, and the wider community.

Assessment
Students will evaluate each other's presentation through a peer-developed assessment instrument (as a rubric or checklist). With teacher as facilitator, students will brainstorm the critical elements needed to evaluate one another. Among the items to be considered:

1. Teacher's expectations for the lesson
2. Curriculum goals
3. Content and organization
4. Performance/grading criteria
5. Coherence and structure of argument
6. Originality
7. Consistency
8. Student goals
9. Weighting of elements in rubric

Extension
Artistic expression. Artists express opinions in unique ways. Research artistic commentaries about war and develop a presentation highlighting how artists express their opinions for or against wars.

Others at Bataan and Corregidor. In addition to the men of the 200th and 515th, there were other soldiers from America who defended the Philippines. Nurses, nuns, priests, and civilians who stayed in the Philippines also got caught up in the war; many spent over 3 years in civilian interment camps. The Filipino people were also integral to the resistance movement after Bataan fell; Filipino and American guerillas kept fighting the Japanese throughout the war. How was their ordeal different from that of the POWs and what is there to learn from their experience?

Home front. What lessons can we collect from those who stayed home during the fighting? How did families cope with missing fathers and sons?