Continuing our journey through history, we finally stumbled upon the “Big Unit”. The one everyone has been waiting for. The WWII unit…

So we last left off at the beginning of the Interwar Years. We looked at the aftermath of WWI and the changes that were occurring in the war. Unfortunately, the end of WWI wasn’t necessarily the end of the instability that was among the world. Countries such as Germany suffered huge economic losses while other countries such as Japan were looking to continue expanding their nation (secretly). Simply put, the Interwar Years were merely a facade, covering the true intentions of a handful of countries who were about to make a great change…

So WWII begins… and so does our big project! Now, this project was definitely different compared to many of the other projects we’ve done for humanities in the past. In the past, we’ve generally shown our learning through various forms of media such as videos, podcasts, and a blog post (such as this one) to show our learning. In this sense, our big project is somewhat similar as it also includes lots of media and podcasts but it also includes something none of us in the class have probably never done before… creating a website. 

Before I get into that though, I do want to mention that there were a lot of individual aspects that were essentially their own projects which went into our websites, these two being our podcasts with a German WWII veteran named Helmut and our book reviews. 

Starting off with one of the most interesting guest speakers I’ve ever gotten to meet, we met a WWII veteran named Helmut. Interesting enough, I have actually spoken with WWII veterans before but this experience was very unique as Helmut wasn’t fighting for the Allies, he was fighting for Germany… I was blown away by this and I immediately thought of a million different questions I wanted to ask him which was good as we all were asked to write down three questions we really wanted to ask Helmut. It’s not every day that you get to meet a veteran from WWII, especially one who fought for Germany. With that in mind, we decided to record our whole experience with Helmut, ranging from his many stories, to who he was, along with our many questions. Afterwards, we all individually edited the hour long audio we had from Helmut and made our own unique podcasts which focused on one of the many things he talked to us about. I decided to go with his answer for the question I asked as I felt that he delivered a really powerful message with his answer. Why tell you about it when you can listen for yourself though?

We also did a book review but I go into complete detail about it in this post here, so you should definitely check it out!

Book Worms

Moving on from our podcast, I want to talk a little more about the website. So we started off our unit by filling out a survey filled with a list of countries that participated in WWII. We were told to pick three countries which we wanted to learn more about and rank them from our first choice to our last choice. I was fortunate to get my first pick, Japan. I was grouped up with Will and Claire and we quickly got to work on figuring out how we were going to build our webpage for Japan. 

Oh right, the website! So we weren’t necessarily making a website per se. Instead, each country group was tasked to create a webpage about their countries which would then be compiled onto a website that was built collaboratively between some students and our teacher, Ms. Maxwell. Each webpage had a very specific set of requirements that would help make each of our end products consistent and of a high quality. Essentially, we had to include:

-Our Countries Pre-WWII

-Our Countries at the Beginning of the war

-Weapons and Technology

-Timeline of WWII for our Individual Countries

-Our Helmut Podcast 

-Details of Specific Battles

-Soldier Details 

-Personal Choice

On top of that, it was also expected that our webpages were relatively consistent with one another in terms of aesthetic. Our webpages had to be laid out neatly as well and EVERYTHING had to be cited using MLA format. 

Speaking of which, what is the MLA format? So as we all might remember in elementary school, we usually had to cite our work just by making a bibliography with a link to whatever webpage we used to aid us in our work. Now, that might’ve worked in elementary school and even throughout high school but universities like it a little bit differently. Plagiarism, cheating, and lying is taken A LOT more seriously in universities and teachers want to make sure that their student’s work comes from their ideas and not from outside sources. On top of that, teachers also want easy access to the sources students used for their work. With that comes different forms of citing work. The general goal for citation formats such as MLA, APA, and Chicago is to give as much necessary information as possible for the works cited by the student/creator. For example, we did a lot of practice using the MLA format —the most common format used in Humanities— by simply writing about the things we learned in WWII. In this case, we wrote about the Battle of Britain from what we learned on this website. Here’s what it looks like.

As one might think, a country like Japan had a lot more going on in WWII than just one battle. That meant many, many sources had to be cited as the point to our webpages was to be filled with information and media that other students could use. I thought that was really interesting that students could be learning and citing OUR own work. That also meant that we needed to make sure that all our our facts were accurate. How do you do that? Well, just go through several sources and see if your information lines up! This also meant that there was a lot of citing going on in our websites

 

So we had our sources, our book reviews, our podcasts, and information for our countries. The only thing that was left to do was to compile everything we did on the website. Speaking of which, how did we put everything together?

 

To start us off, our teacher made a very basic structure of what our website was going to look like on an application called Weebly. Unfortunately, she had to leave when we first started using it and we came across a few problems that involved work being deleted and people not being able to edit at the same time. Eventually, solutions were found and we were able to get to work. Luckily for most of us, we had already written and put together everything that needed to be included on our site; It was all a matter of inserting it onto our site. We then spent class time critiquing everyone’s webpages and writing down revisions that could be made. This was helpful as we had a guest coming to our classroom who actually happened to be the teacher of OUR teacher! Anyways, our guest also happens to be very knowledgeable when it comes to WWII and we all felt a lot of pressure to make sure we were presenting our best work. To help us prepare for this, we took our critique from our webpages and did a mock presentation a few days before our guest came in order to know what we needed to improve upon. 

Either way, our real presentation day had finally arrived and we all got the chance to share the factual and technical aspects of our website to the class. Ms. Barter, our guest, gave us her thoughts and opinions on our webpages after we were done presenting which led to our final round of revisions. The general statement was that the perspective of the countries we were representing needed to become more present as it seemed like we were just listing off facts. As the name of our website is perspectivesofww2, it seemed fit that we should include the perspectives our our countries during WWII. Our final revisions were made based on the critique we got from Ms. Barter and that finally leaves us to where we are now… this post. 

This unit was definitely unique as I feel like it brought lots of things we don’t normally put together into one big pot. We had a selection of guest speakers, podcasts, segments of writing and research, books, essays, and making a website. These are all things that we would normally separate into their own unique categories but in this case, we really needed to bring everything we had to the table. We needed to be able to organize groups and group work while also focusing on our own solo work which was definitely something we haven’t been able to do much of in the past. I really enjoyed the fact that I really needed to use every skill I’ve learned this year for this specific project as it made me realize what you can do by mixing your skills together. Overall, this project is definitely the kind of project I want to be seeing more often as it adds a lot more value to the skills you’re learning.