Our unit of work has been a first for Quinns Beach School and admired by many of the 400 visitors to our school. These include:
The inspiration for adhering to the Learning Quest model began after a collegiate planning meeting. We shared and discussed the ideas presented by Tom March in the Working the Web for Education article. We outlined the learning outcomes we wished to address with our students and started thinking about a suitable topic that could maximise the use of our school’s range of technologies in a motivated and innovative way.
The inspiration for the content came from the ITSC at Edith Cowan University. As Senior Years Learning Facilitators we were exploring the various options in developing our school’s vision and S.A.i.i.L. philosophy (Selective Approaches to Integrated Inquiry Learning).
Our Multi-Aged multi-level Group (MAG) of students includes Students at Educational Risk, English as a Second Language and Aboriginal students. To cater for these individual differences, we negotiated a student’s interest topic of animation. One of our goals for our students is to help them to make choices regarding their learning. This style of delivery allows learning to take place beyond the school boundaries. A student who had a contagious condition from another class was able to continue his learning from home by accessing our web page. We planned our online program, selected tasks to achieve specific learning goals.
In our teams we identify block education outcomes and collegiately planned to cater for the needs of our classes. We determined the research our students were to do and designed the website accordingly. After the initial setup of the project, our daily planning and reflection meetings were held using instant messaging from home during the evenings, keeping the webpage current. During the term we’ve also mentored other staff members on the integration on ICT in the classroom. This led to us presenting our webpage and support of the Tom March philosophy during an internet café session. As a result many staff are trialing parts of the Learning Quest model for next term.
Our classes found this program fun, challenging, engaging and different. The wider community are accessing our page as we have had almost 2000 site visitors.
Steve Hardingham & Larni Retallack
By Steve Hardingham & Larni Retallack
qbstheme@lycos.com
Last updated
February 26, 2003
https://qbstheme.tripod.com/