For middle school teachers, I would recommend having students look at the "Interactive Map of the cities along the Silk Road" on the Silk Road: Dialogue, Diversity and Development website when learning about the Silk Road. This map is really interesting because it allows students to click on the important cities along the silk road interactive map and each city has a description of the city and its significance to the silk road (flag, country, capital, region, and type of trade route for this city).
I would use this by assigning students a different city or having them take notes on 3 different cities of their choice, then pairing up with 1-3 people in the class and finding commonalities and differences between the cities (jigsaw). You could go deeper by having students analyze the effects of the silk road on the culture of the city, the political and economic effects, etc. Another extension would be to have students pretend they live in one city and write to someone in another city. What would their lives be like? What would be different between the 2 cities? Also, you could have students think about how long a message would take to travel between the 2 cities, in comparison to their instant text messaging technologies. Basically, this website has a lot of potential for various lessons!
edited by cgao on 7/6/2016
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