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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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->