Title: Tips for teachers - "Campaign Issues"
Course: US Election 2012 - Leuphana Copy > Section: Campaign Issues

In this section of the course, the students will mostly work with cartoons and try to "read" them. You as a teacher have to do some managing work to facilitate this process. Don't be afraid, it's easy!

In Task 1 the students have to identify the most important issues of this year's campaigns. Therefore, in the beginning all activities which relate to issues requiring a name are invisible or have a neutral name like "Cartoon 1".

As an introduction to this task cycle we have provided a glossary "Find titles for the cartoons" with cartoons about the campaigns. The cartoons do not have a title yet. Ask the students to suggest suitable titles by commenting on each cartoon online. Discuss the suggestions in class and choose the most appropriate titles together. You as a teacher should now edit the glossary entry and add the title you all have chosen. (Note: a glossary entry can only be edited by the person who wrote the original entry - the course developer - or by a teacher.) You can also name the Cartoons to discuss respectively and open them for further studies.

In Task 2 the students have to do some sound research on the most important campaign issues in groups. We have already provided a choice Build research groups which is hidden. So you should open it as soon as the class has agreed on the most important campaign issues. If your class is too big for only 4 groups and you want smaller groups, feel free to change the choice respectively.
The students will find a page with Web resources for your research, but may study much more.

To finish, aks them to write their findings into the wiki Campaign issues overview. We have provided a table for this purpose in the wiki. If the wiki is too slow, use GoogleDocs (or some other solution) and provide the link on the course page.

Task 3 suggests three different activities for creative conclusions. The students will stay in their research groups and decide on one activity. All three activities are organized as assignments. This normally means individual work. So one person of each group has to volunteer to submit the group's results and you as a teacher have to take this into account.

To make good results visible to everybody in class, use the folder Collection of solutions.To do this you have to download the students' files in the assignments to your personal computer and to upload them to the open folder. Sorry - this sounds complicated, but isn't in fact.

We have provided some optional homework Interpret a cartoon to practice for examinations.