The Crusades Project
At its heart, your task is simple: Demonstrate your understanding of the Muslim perspective on the Crusades. Show me that you can articulate what the response of the average Muslim on the street from 1098-1291 was when he/she heard the word “Crusade,” and why did he or she have this response? You must incorporate at least three different Crusades in your project to show the impact they had on the Muslim world and worldview.
To do this, you have a wide-open field of options. You design the method by which you are going to show me your understanding. The requirements are these:
- You must make your thought process transparent throughout the project via your blog. To wit: you must address the following questions as you go along (so not just one blog post at the end, but several over the days—you should think of this as a project journal with daily entries):
Which 3 Crusades will you be focusing on?
Why are you making the choices you made as far as topic?
How do you hope to accomplish your goal?
How and where are you finding your information?
Is one search engine proving to be more useful than another?
What problems are you having with finding the information?
Why have you chosen to display your understanding in this way?
What problems occur(ed) with this choice?
Did it work as you envisioned? Why or why not?
Other topics you want to discuss.
- Your final product must be digital and accessible through your blog, either by link, download or by “hard” content (that which we can view on the blog itself). In the event that your project takes a form that is not "blog friendly," you must include explicit instructions on your blog as to how to access your project.
- You must find other students in any section of AP World who are either covering the same topics or using a similar methodology via their blogs and offer advice, share materials, provide feedback, or just give some general support for what they are doing. This may not only be the person you sit next to in class! YOU MAY COLLABORATE in any way you like, but you each must produce your own understanding, and you will receive an individual grade. Any commentary you offer on another student's blog must be copied and posted to your own blog. Be sure to incorporate the person’s name (i.e.: Dear Mary,...) in the post!
You may not just use Google for your searches. Use bing.com, yahoo.com, sweetsearch.com, or any other search engine you choose in conjunction with the big G. Here’s a helpful hint for you: each country has its own country code for websites. So if you go to: http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/wwwstat/country-codes.txt, to see the list of codes, and then try www.google.JO, for instance, you get the Arabic version of Google that appears in the country of Jordan. This turns up some different results than Google.com does…Likewise Wikipedia is fine to use, but do not solely rely upon it; it is a good place to start, but a horrible place to finish. Reflect on the usefulness or non-usefulness of the non-Google search options in a blog post!
Feel free to rely upon your own pre-existing social networks, or reach out to others to help you out with this project. Facebook, Skype and Twitter are powerful tools with a global reach…
If you are stuck for ideas, have a conversation with me!
You will be assessed on the basis of the following items:
- Your adherence to the above criteria;
- The attribution you provide for your sources (EVERYTHING must be sourced) so you need a formal bibliography;
- The depth of research you do (Only using Wikipedia guarantees a grade not higher than a C for this section. You need multiple sources…);
- The depth of understanding you display (minimal, shallow, moderate, deep);
- The detail of events you provide as support (What happened in these Crusades to make the Muslim world react in the way you describe?);
- The creativity of your project. (You could make a poster and take a picture of it, but that wouldn’t be very creative, now, would it?)
This is due by the start of class on Friday, January 11th.
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