week 4 reflections

The Learning Federation
This week's learning focus is on educational soundness and on critical thinking.  We were introduced to the learning federation website: http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/default.asp The Learning Federation is a project of Education Services Australia, who manages the national resource collection and infrastructure of digital resources aligned with the Australian Curriculums. I found this to be an extremely useful site for teaching as it provides samples of digital curriculum content by learning area such as arts and design, business and enterprise, civics and citizenship, early years, english and literacy, environmental education, environmental education for sustainability, languages, mathematics and numeracy and science. Below are the snapshots of the mathematics and science samples of digital curriculum content provided by the Learning Federation. It is definitely an important reference and resource site for my teaching purposes.

The Learning Federation is excellent example of websites that provide learning objects. Learning objects are digital resources that provide content and can be reused tosupport learning. Other examples of learning objects include:

1) BBC Revisewise. This site provides interactives in English, Science and Maths for primary scool students:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/index.shtml


2) Wicked Science Interactives : Switched on to science. http://www.tki.org.nz/r/wick_ed/topics/science.php

3)  Wicked Maths Interactives. This site provides exciting mathematics games to improve your basic fact recall: http://www.tki.org.nz/r/wick_ed/maths/interactives.php

4) A Science Odyssey: You try it. This site features 8 learning objects: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/

5) Teachers' Domain. This site provides thousands of media resources, support materials and tools for classroom lessons, individualised learning programs and teacher professional learning communities. http://www.teachersdomain.org/

Workshop Activities

In the workshop, we had a spreadsheet activity and a dreamtime stories inspiration task.

Spreadsheet Activity

On the spreadsheet activity, we were told to bring our own small packet of M&Ms to the workshop. Then using excel spreadsheet, we constructed vertical bar charts showing the respective colours of the M&Ms candies. The task was completed as shown.The excel spreadsheet activity was easy and fun. This website focus on the importance of using spreadsheets in the curriculum and the educational value of spreadsheet activities to improve students' achievements: http://www.alicechristie.org/edtech/ss/ This website advocates integrating spreadsheets in the classroom and provides websites to support the teaching of spreadsheets: http://www.amphi.com/~psteffen/excel.html
This particular site is provided in the lesson to show students how to use Microsoft software in the classroom with tips and tricks presented in "how-to" articles: http://www.microsoft.com/education/howto.mspx

Inspiration task on Dreamtime stories

Next, we moved on to an Inspiration task on dreamtime stories. We were directed to an interesting site called Dust Echoes on ABC dot net dot au: http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/ . Dust Echoes is a series of twelve beautifully animated dreamtime stories from Central Arnhem Land, telling stories of love, loyalty, duty to country and aboriginal custom and law.  According to Tom Lewis, actor, musician, Indigenous consultant, "Dust Echoes is one way that we are bringing everyone back to the same campfire - black and white. We are telling our stories to you in a way you can understand, to help you see, hear and know. And we are telling these stories to ourselves, so that we will always remember, with pride, who we are. "  Among the twelve stories, I have chosen the Mermaid Story (see attached below).  The story is about belonging and pull of the family and the country (see attached below for the story).

Here is a snapshot of the study guide and the suggested classroom activities:

Many schools have incorporated dreamtime stories into their classroom lessons, an example of this is Pallara State School :http://pallarass.eq.edu.au/wcmss/index.php/classroom-news/year-two/three-love-dreamtime-stories.html

"Through the incorporation of stories from the Dreaming students gain 'understanding of the unique relationship that Aboriginal and other indigenous people have to the land', (BOS NSW, 2003, p.12). This kind of activities help to promote the development of students' competence in 'collecting, analysing and organising information' (Board of Studies NSW [BOS NSW], 2003, p. 14) and 'working with others and in teams' (p. 15). Through the use of Explicit Quality Criteria (New South Wales Department of Education and Training [NSW DET], 2003) and scaffolding, students are encouraged to become self- directed and self-regulated learners (NSW DET, 2003) In addition, the collaborative design of these activities foster Social Support (NSW DET, 2003) amongst students which facilitates the inclusion of learner's of diverse abilities, and the assessment for learning task allows all students' to achieve a measure of success." ( Source:  www.scu.edu.au/library/download.php?doc_id=5552&site_id )

This is what was described as "back to basics" approach  by the  former  Prime Minister Kevin  Rudd. He said that Australia's national school curriculum will return history, grammar, literature and phonetics to the classroom. He also mentioned that the curriculum will also place Aboriginal and Asian ways of seeing the world into almost every subject.  
http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/backtobasics-approach-for-australias-classrooms-20100227-pa8t.html

This artice talks about the importance of promoting critical thinking in the classroom: http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-9211/critical.htm 

This website is a discussion forum on critical thinking using technology: http://www.classroom20.com/forum/topics/critical-thinking-using

Conclusion

In conclusion, I learned that technology is an extremely powerful and efficient tool to use in the promotion of critical thinking in the classroom.