MHS+Overview

Task
Your task, should you choose to accept it (as if you had a choice!) is to identify the reasons that caused people to risk their lives and explore the world around them. You will also available resources to explore and gather biographical information and create content of various forms from that point of view.

Process
Our research begins with a study unit on the Age of Exploration and the explorers that sought fame and riches on their voyages to the new world.
 * 1) Check with your teacher to find out which explorer you have been assigned.
 * 2) Using literature obtained from your library and the list of websites that have been provided by your teacher, answer the questions for the key areas contained on the Explorer Research Sheet. Using your research page within your class’s collaborative wikispace, fill in the information that has been collected.
 * 3) Use the Internet to find 3-5 images related to your assigned person. This can in the form of images of themselves, maps of the areas that they explored, ships that they sailed, places they had lived in, etc. Save these images where your teacher has specified. These will be used later.
 * 4) Look through your images to find one with your explorer looking straight ahead. Using Adobe Photoshop Essentials and the "Photoshop buttons" resource paper, use the crop tool to create a "head shot" image of your assigned person.
 * 5) Think about your explorer, their experiences, their goals and their accomplishments. If your explorer could say one sentence about themselves, what might it be? Write that down on the last page your research packet.
 * 6) Using the web site [|www.gizmos.com] and the registration information suppied by your teacher, create an avatar. You will use the head shot and quote information that you created earlier. You can either speak it yourself using a microphone or use the "text to speech" tool.
 * 7) Using the "Historical Blog Sheet", write a blog entry as if you were your assigned explorer.
 * 8) Enter or embed all of the data collected and multimedia created on our Ning []

Conclusion
After completing this project, students will better understand what made people explore the planet and brave all of the risks of doing so. They will also better understand the contributions these brave people made and how they truly helped to open the world up to new possibilities.