Week Five

Week Five

This week during the lecture we looked at ‘The New Basics Project’ which was a four year pilot project undertaken by Education Queensland to incorporate a series of cross-curricular units into specifically selected schools across Queensland.  (The State of Queensland, 2004). This project aimed to increase student engagement and learning through a series of specially created integrated tasks. These tasks called Rich Tasks enabled students to engage in productive pedagogies which included intellectual quality, connectedness, supportive classroom environment and recognition of difference. 

It is interesting to note that whilst this project only ran for four years, its rationale proved to be very popular.  In fact so popular that Rich Tasks continued to be incorporated into many schools for several years afterwards.  My own children actually attended a school (for a few years) that used these integrated tasks and I found that many teachers spoke positively about them, however others thought that students were spending too much time on Rich Tasks and not enough time on the basics such as literacy and numeracy.  My own opinion of this framework lies somewhere in-between.  I think for some students (particularly the brighter ones) that these tasks were fantastic, however for lower level and special needs students they were problematic in the sense that these students often needed more teacher directed lessons and Rich Tasks were predominantly student centred and constructivist based.  However saying that if individual teachers were aware of this then they could have modified/adjusted tasks to cater for individual learner needs.

Digital Presentation

Our group presentation is coming along nicely with all three us finally agreeing on our content area, pedagogy and technology.  We had decided early on that we wanted to use Windows Movie Maker – video editing using a constructivist approach, however we were uncertain about what content area to focus on.  We have decided to go with an integrated unit approach but predominantly focus on mathematics as our main topic.  So far we have collaboratively written the script and now need to focus on getting the video filmed.

Stay tuned for more ……..

References:

The State of Queensland, (2004).  Department of Education and Training.  The New Basics Project.  Brisbane.  Retrieved online on 2 April 2011 from http://education.qld.gov.au/corporate/newbasics/index.html