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Class Project in Mr. Reiter's sophomore Global History class.

Mr. Reiter's sophomore Global History IV classes took part in a class project that allowed the students to participate, build, and present presentations on the topic they were studying. The topic was the economic issues after World War II during the Cold War. There were a number of areas that were included in this project.
  1. We studied about the differences between a free market economy, the basis of our capitalist system, and a command economy used by the Soviet Union and other communist nations.
  2. Another topic included studying about some of the major non-aligned nations - namely India, and nations in Latin America and the newly independent nations of Africa.
  3. We studied about how West Germany and the rest of western Europe prospered after World War II with the help of money from the U.S. and the Marshall Plan. One result of this was the creation of the European Economic Community - the Common Market and the eventual creation of one single, common currency, the Euro.
  4. Another area of our studies included post war Japan and how Japan became an economic superpower, also with the help of money from the U.S. We saw how Japan not only invested in industrial growth but also invested heavily in education so that its people would become a highly skilled and trained workforce able to compete with the other powerful industrial nations of the world.
  5. We included a topic about the emerging power of other economic superpowers - the Asian nations bordering on the Pacific rim - the "Asian Tigers". These countries included South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
  6. Lastly, we included the topic of the oil-rich Middle East and OPEC. This organization, headed by the wealthy oil kingdoms in the Middle East, are able to control the supply of oil and thus are able to control the price of oil and oil products such as gasoline. This area has been an area of much political unrest and violence and has been a major concern due to our dependency on the oil we get from this region.

The project involved the classes being broken into small groups with each group being assigned a document to be analyzed and then presented to the rest of the class as PowerPoint presentations.
The result of the analysis was then entered into the laptap computers. Included in the presentations were pictures describing the events as well as special animation and sound features to "dress up" the presentations.

Finally, each group presented their project by displaying their work to the class using the LCD projector connected to a computer and thus "teaching" the class about their documents.

After each presentation, there was a short question and answer session.
You can see some of the finished presenatation projects by clicking here->