PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking site from the St. Petersburg Times that brought you the Truth-o-Meter during the 2008 presidential election, has posted a new device for tracking President Obama’s 510 campaign promises: The Obameter.
Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media have created Budget Hero, an engaging online game that challenges users to balance the federal budget (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2008/05/budget_hero/). The game relies on numbers and budget forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and offers users options for balancing the budget like cutting aid to foreign governments or increasing the retirement age to 67.
Most of your students can tell you where they were on 9/11, just as a generation ago people could remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy died. Each generation has its pivotal moment; for the WWII generation, that event was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
National Geographic has captured Pearl Harbor’s events in a multi-media timeline and map that would work well as a history mini-unit, stretching over one or two class periods. http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ax/map.html The site’s interactive timeline pulls up maps of the Hawaiian Islands with ship and aircraft movements. Clicking on Full Story reveals a paragraph about each event on the timeline, photos from the moment, and sometimes first-person testimonials about the event.
Psephophobia is the fear of voting.
Maybe voters are afraid of the small booths, the machines, or the hanging chad. Perhaps young voters just don’t know what to expect.
Whatever their fear, a 2003 study from Representative Democracy in America: Voices of the People found that only 66 percent of 15- 26-year-olds thought voting was part of being a good citizen.
My new favorite site for in-depth politics is from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato. Sabato calls his site the Crystal Ball and bills itself as the Web’s most accurate political analysis. I’m not qualified to judge that, but I do think the site would be useful in a classroom.
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