In this lesson, students apply their state’s requirements for registering to vote. Students learn when and how to register, how to complete a voter registration form, and when and how to reregister.

This lesson focuses on a voter’s need to be fully informed prior to casting a vote on Election Day and how to acquire the necessary information. Students learn what a yes or no vote or a decision to abstain means on a ballot. Students learn the definitions of amendment, initiative, proposition, and referendum. By completing the handouts for school referendums, students are given the opportunity to think critically and to learn firsthand why voters need to be fully informed about ballot questions.

In the following three modules, students will learn how Marian uses storytelling, film, and poetry in her activism. Her stories of Black heroes round out our history books. With love and humor, she finds allies, and starts important conversations in her effort to build a “beloved community”– one that is civil, equitable, and harmonious.

This resource gives an overview of women's efforts on the homefront during WWII including social, political, and economic efforts.

Share some great Google Slides practices with your students through this amazing post from Control Alt Achieve.

The Big6 is a six-stage model to help anyone solve problems or make decisions by using information. Students can use this model to guide them through the research process. This resource is a lesson plan that compares the Big6 to the CIA.

The Great Salt Lake (GSL) is drying up and molecular biologist Bonnie Baxter’s message is the harbinger of environmental devastation to come. Her unprecedented research of the lake's two major food chains, brine shrimp and brine flies, shows that both are on the brink of collapse due to increased salinization as lake shorelines recede.

This lesson plan meets the secondary requirements for The Engish Language Arts Standard Reading: Literature Grades 7-12 with the option of meeting the additional standard of Speaking and Listening. This lesson offers specific details with flexibility for implementation in the classroom. Students can work independently or in groups and be able to create their final book project using technology. 

Students will capture their own images to promote or recommend a book from their personal reading. This assignment is designed to blend principles from digital photography, design, and library media standards to demonstrate deeper understanding and critical thinking skills.  This lesson plan was created by Andrea Settle then remixed by Melissa Jensen.Image: "Student Photographer" by Melissa Jensen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This resource is a Social Studies student activity that utilizes Utah's Online School Library resources - specifically, Gale's Kids Infobits Grade K-6, Gale's Research in Context Grades 6-8, and Gale's Reference Collection Grades 9-12 to help students learn about the Buffalo Soldiers. 

Students will learn how to make a personal educational portfolio with Google Sites.

In this lesson, students go further into the collection and interpretation of data, including cleaning and visualizing data. Students first look at the how presenting data in different ways can help people to understand it better, and they then create visualizations of their own data. Using a the results of a preferred pizza topping survey, students must decide what to do with data that does not easily fit into the visualization scheme that they have chosen. Finally, students look at which parts of this process can be automated by a computer and which need a human to make decisions.

In this lesson students get practice making decisions with data based on some problems designed to be familiar to middle school students. Students work in groups discussing how they would use the data presented to make a decision before the class discusses their final choices. Not all questions have right answers and in some cases students can and should decide that they should collect more data. The lesson concludes with a discussion of how different people could draw different conclusions from the same data, or how collecting different data might have affected the decisions they made.

Students begin the lesson by looking at a cake preference survey that allows respondents to specify both a cake and an icing flavor. They discuss how knowing the relationship between cake and icing preference helps them better decide which combination to recommend. They are then introduced to cross tabulation, which allows them to graph relationships to different preferences. They use this technique to find relationships in a preference survey, then brainstorm the different types of problems that this process could help solve.

In this lesson students look at a simple example of how a computer could be used to complete the decision making step of the data problem solving process. Students are given the task of creating an algorithm that could suggest a vacation spot. Students then create rules, or an algorithm, that a computer could use to make this decision automatically. Students share their rules and what choices their rules would make with the class data. They then use their rules on data from their classmates to test whether their rules would make the same decision that a person would. The lesson concludes with a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of using computers to automate the data problem solving process.

To conclude this unit, students design a recommendation engine based on data that they collect and analyze from their classmates. After looking at an example of a recommendation app, students follow a project guide to complete this multi-day activity. In the first several steps, students choose what choice they want to help the user to make, what data they need to give the recommendation, create a survey, and collect information about their classmates' choices. They then interpret the data and use what they have learned to create the recommendation algorithm. Last, they use their algorithms to make recommendations to a few classmates. Students perform a peer review and make any necessary updates to their projects before preparing a presentation to the class.

In this lesson, students look at how data is collected and used by organizations to solve problems in the real world. The lesson begins with a quick review of the data problem solving process they explored in the last lesson. Then students are presented three scenarios that could be solved using data and brainstorm the types of data they would want to solve them and how they could collect the data. Each problem is designed to reflect a real-world service that exists. After brainstorming, students watch a video about a real-world service and record notes about what data is collected by the real-world service and how it is used. At the end of the lesson, students record whether data was provided actively by a user, was recorded passively, or is collected by sensors.

In the first lesson of the data unit, students get an overview of what data is and how it is used to solve problems. Students start off with a brief discussion to come to a common understanding of data. They then split into groups and use a data set to make a series of meal recommendations for people with various criteria. Each group has the choices of meal represented in a different way (pictures, recipes, menu, nutrition) that gives an advantage for one of the recommendations. Afterwards, groups compare their responses and discuss how the different representations of the meal data affected how the students were able to solve the different problems.