Amy's Blog

My inquiry unit is called “How can we protect Coastal Environements?” It is an inquiry into coastal environments and the human impacts on them. I chose this topic as the ocean is one of our most precious natural resources and it is important that students understand the need to protect them. Inquiry learning is a great way to plan a unit of work as it really makes you think about what the outcomes you want to achieve are and the learning experiences you will give students in order to achieve them. I found that the six stages of inquiry learning really helped me to sort out how I wanted to organise my unit of work. I think the planner was a valuable tool as the initial stages required me to work out what I wanted students to achieve and how I would assess it. Once I had that worked out it was easy to write the learning plan in Stage 3 as I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve. I spent a lot of time thinking about the final assessment task for the students as I wanted it to be something that used ICT in a new and meaningful way and allowed students to share what they have learnt and created with others. To access my integrated unit plan on Google Docs visit my wiki page.

I rated my assessment task as an average 3 out of 5 . To view how I rated each element click here. I found rating my assessment task for each element an interesting task and I found that I had to change my assessment task a bit to be able to rate the task higher for some elements. It really made me think about what I wanted students to achieve and whether the assessment was making them think deeply and make real connections with the topic or was it just superficial. I found it difficult to incorporate some elements int the assessment task I wanted to do for the topic. For example I had to rate Cultural Knowledge as 1 as this was not relevant to the topic or the task.

I think developing a unit of work was a useful task for me to do especially as it is my last ever assignment I will have to do at uni! It has given me a useful resource that I will be able to use when I am out teaching. I have learnt that it is important to work out what the outcomes you want to achieve are first before you begin to plan activities. If you know what the outcomes are, it is much easier to plan how students will achieve them. I have also learnt that there is no point integrating ICT into a lesson just for the sake of it. If it is something that can be done on paper, then is it not going to be a meaningful use for ICT. I think one of the major benefits of integrating ICT into units of work is the opportunity to collaborate and share ideas with others.