Renaissance Passes

I am working with a sixth grade teacher on reviewing the Big 6 process with her kids through a project in which they are each researching an important person from the Renaissance as an introduction to the unit. We are doing a quick three day lesson (day 1=review of Big 6 and brainstorm sources, day 2=research, day 3=create project). They are looking for brief information such as:

When and where did they live?
Why are they famous?
What effect did their contributions have on society?
Can we still their contributions today? How?

The sixth graders are hard to get interested in much, so we wanted a cool way to present the information. We thought about a movie poster, but settled on an ID Pass from Big Huge Labs (see my previous post about it) as a better way to present this information. Here is an example I made today.

After making the sample card I realized how little text you can fit on it, so this is also going to be a great way to force students to practice taking the long winded notes on their papers and summarize them into a few sentences. I would definitely suggest trying it before you show it to students just to practice because the first one I made had words on top of words when I wrote too much.

We are using the Member Since for birthdate and Expiration for death. The header describes the person - artist, religious leader, ruler, king, etc. The footer is the citation for their picture. The bio should include where they lived, what they contributed to society and how we still see it today. I am excited to see what they come up with.

What are some other ways you can think of to use this for a project?

Edited to say: They had a little harder time than I would have expected summarizing and understanding contributions of their person. We need to spend more time on this and model that question more specifically on someone they are not researching to understand how to answer the questions. I didn't think the questions about their contribution and its impact would be difficult, but it is not a 'right there' answer I guess so they didn't get the idea behind the question. I still like the idea and they loved using it! Here are a couple of examples they did and you can see where we need to work on them a bit still and also talk about the evaluation part of Big 6 more to check your work.