March Madness Time, Student Creativity

Don't have a very long post as I'm working on grad school work, but I wanted to share these which I'm really excited about.  I'm a huge college basketball fan and obviously there is no greater time than March Madness.  If I could, I'd show games all day that first Thursday and Friday.  So many underdogs and the games are constant from noon til 11 or so at night.  It's awesome.  So what better way to bring some of this excitement to my students than to set up a march madness contest/project.

Our next two units are a bit slower paced, so I'm hoping to use them at least for 8th grade as a way to be kind of a catch all unit since we've flown through so many things, so quickly the first 4 units.  For 7th grade, I'll combine governments, world leaders into our last unit of wars and conflict to keep them engaged too.  I hope these are fun, I've randomly given each student a number that put them in one of the categories for each project.  The students will then nominate our persons (although for 7th grade since it's a new unit, I'll probably add some leaders for them).  Once each student has their person, I'll use print my brackets to randomly match everyone up.  The brackets will be big, 96 for my 8th graders and 48 for 7th.  Here are the links to both sites.  Thanks to @Braz74 and @SofiaGeorgelos for their inspiration and ideas for this project.  I've tweaked their work to create this.  Hopefully I can repay the favor some day with what I come up with.

Most Influential American https://sites.google.com/site/marchmadness8thgrade/
Most Powerful Leader in World Historyhttps://sites.google.com/site/rowesmarchmadness7thgrade/

Lastly, I got some really good projects for our Social Change project.  While I still had quite a few of the boring old power points, I had some students go out on a limb as I told them I'd reward them for creativity.  Had nearly a dozen students create flipagrams through instagram to due slideshows and use that for their biographical projects.  I was also pleased to have some students choose some lesser known people rather than just MLK and Rosa Parks, which I was really glad to see as well.  It's definitely inspired me to do this again and try to continue to push the students to be creative and try to show their knowledge in ways other than the boring status quo.

Thanks for reading, time for bed.