2 May 2012

Research TechnologiesAssignment 3a has certainly been a challenge, firstly trying to grasp the concept of what is expected in this task, furthermore scheduling group times, discussions, ideas and also finalisation.  I was fortunate to be grouped with Nikki, Monique, Chelsea and Paul to work on our group assignment. We were required to create a authentic learning resouce to share with other teachers. So our group first though we would look at the skeletal system but after some researcher decided as a team too look at a broarder concept to cover move learning areas. We decided on the topic of travelling arounbd Australia as this allowed us to incoporate maths, literacy, IT and georgraphy with many other elements.  We checked to ciriculiam and ensured we followed it while still ensuring it to be a authentic task.

We decided on a task that would be covered over a term period and engage the children in the use of multimedia with the final presentation from the children being a powerpoint presenttion with a kid blog used as an electronic diary for them to reflect. The students were to work in teams which allows for collaboration. Our team refered to week 4 and week 6 lectures on authentic learning to make sure we were on track.

Learning with technology lecture in week 4 covered the elements of an authentic task and through using this information we came up with incorporaating the following elements into our task -
Authentic context - Purpose/motivation, travel and discover Australia
Authentic activity - Real world relevence, possible to acheive
Mutliperspective - Different point of views and ideas from students
Collaboration - Students work in groups
Reflection - Online Kidblog for expressive language
Articulation - Ongoing discussions on the next step/understanding
Coaching/Scaffolding - Ongoing teacher-student support and student - student support
Authertic Assessment - Integrate task, final presentation

This unit so far has taught me an abundance of new technologies and this assignment was no exception.  We have used Wikispaces as our technology platform for presenting our resource. I have also discovered all the wonderful things that you can do on google maps, I have utilised the learning federation along with other interactive whiteboard sites such as gecko interactive.