Maths

After more discussions with Ms. Culey, Tom developed a Subject Sampler on Statistics for year Maths classes. The idea is to get students engaged in some number crunching around topics that might be interesting to them. Music sales, box office receipts, Web site statistics, and personal wealth are used as the raw materil for finding out averages, median, means, etc. This kind of activity can be used in the computer lab, but it might be helpful to explore some of the links or the overall approach in the classroom with a data projector first. Ms. Culey will use it with her students next week and then consider developing a Classportal on the subject with her year 8 class.

Geography

Mr. Freeman approached Tom to find some links on the debate surrounding uranium mining in Jabiluka. He had already prepared an outstanding activity where students formed into groups to look at the issue from multiple perspectives. The linked Hotlist of Jabiluka Web sites will be used to provide students with real, rich and relevant resources on the subject. Each student will be responsible for finding and outstanding argument to support their role’s perspective. These will be added to a Pro and Con wiki page before the class engages in a debate. Mr. Freeman is considering whether to have an English teacher help students learn effective debate strategies.

History

Very interesting discussions with Mr. Craig have led to the creation of a Year 8 History Weblog to support his students’ use of a wiki on Early Australian discoveries. This project is likely to help the whole school formulate its own approach to how students complete online projects. Tom and Peter are working together to mock-up a process that encourages both student responsilbility for learning as well as freedom to explore personal interests. Watch this space for further updates.

Science

Mr. Bevan has taken off running with his students with the building of a Blog on Atmospherics. Students have already posted links to the Blog and Mr. Bevan has explored different Themes that easily change the look-and-feel of the site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 2:23 am and is filed under updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.