Assignment 2: A Learning Sequence

The Australian Curriculum identifies Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capability as one of the seven general capabilities that all students need to develop for the 21st Century. As students learn to access, create, communicate and work collaboratively, they need to learn to 'make the most of the digital
technologies available to them, adapting to new ways of doing things as technologies evolve and limiting the risks to themselves and others in a digital environment' (Australian Curriculum, 2013). In order to provide students with the opportunities to fully develop this capability, teachers need to identify the context of a unit of work and consider the most appropriate learning tasks and technology that will allow for learning to be enhanced and ultimately transformed: the components of the TPACK Framework. When designing units of work, as Mishra. P and Koehler. M (2007) states 'particular technologies have their own propensities, biases, affordances and constraints' and so it is necessary to consider these affordances before deciding how technology will be integrated within the unit.

The opportunity for students to be engaged in authentic tasks that address the General Capabilities and cross-curricular learning goals, enables them to work with real-life issues and develop collaborative problem-solving skills. This learning sequence was developed after a planning process of considering the 3 phases of learning and the pedagogy and digital approaches.

Learning Sequence Overview

Student attendance at the local youth literature festival has started to decline. The Year 5 students have been asked to assist with promotion of a literature festival where popular authors/artists are invited to participate in book talks and performance sessions.

Students work in groups of 4 to create a multimedia advertisement for an author session to promote the literature festival to the local school community.

Phase of learning	Task outline	Pedagogy links and digital approaches
Phase 1 Establishing the authentic context for the unit, task definition and negotiation Units 1 and 6 multimodal narrative	Gather information about the authors invited to participate: work collaboratively to select author to promote. Choose author to promote and character to analyse by exploring author websites and making connections to books of interest or familiarity	Connectedness and student interest Research the scope of the literature festival using  blended approach: online and face to face interviews with organisers Recording of information using online recording tool such as google docs or wiki embedded in class edstudio
Phase 2 Exploration and co-construction of knowledge, analysis	Analyse main character in text, focussing on how language is used to represent characters. (Unit 1 C2C) Analyse author personality using author website and biographical information. Collaboratively develop a concept map to represent the author and the main character.  Use the concept map to assist with writing a viewpoint about how the author’s personality has influenced their character Share this in class blog for peers to provide feedback	Student driven as students decide on author and character to explore Character Analysis templates and author personality templates provided to scaffold task. Online brainstorming tools Socially constructed and Negotiated knowledge
Phase 3 Creation and presentation of solution	Create multimodal advertisement to promote literature festival. This is to be shared publicly on literature festival website so students need to ensure that legal and ethical guidelines are followed when using digital resources.	Interaction within and beyond the classroom to reinforce learning Students provided with options for creating multimodal advertisement Group creates advertisement using Glogster, Thinglink Powerpoint or other chosen tool, shares in class edstudio to receive feedback, consider feedback and address changes if necessary.

Education Queensland provides a suitable platform for the students to use to work collaboratively, store information and share creations. EdStudios are continually being modified and a wider range of digital tools made available, so this platform has been chosen for the students to store and share their work.

For the initial phase of the unit, students are presented with an authentic problem: that school attendance at the local Literature Festival is declining and that the Year 5 students are being asked to promote this festival within the local school community. They will work in small groups to create a multimodal advertisement to encourage more students to attend to ensure that this festival continues for years to come. By tasking each group with choosing a different author and character from one of their books to present using multimodal tools, students are addressing achievement standards of the Australian Curriculum (character analysis and ICT capability). The use of technology for this phase enables faster information gathering as well as collaborative decision making as the groups research the authors attending and collaboratively record and negotiate decisions using a Google Drive table created by the teacher and then embedded into a class EdStudio. The collaborative nature of this task allows students to feel ownership over the decisions for their advertisement.

For the second phase of the unit, students need to analyse one of their chosen author's main characters as well as the author's personality. This information will form the basis of the advertisement, so needs to be done well. The teacher will scaffold this learning phase by providing character analysis templates and exemplars. Online brainstorming tools will be used to show links between how the author does, or doesn't, parallel the character in the book. Discussion boards are created in the EdStudio to enable students to support the members of their group as well as the other groups through this process. The group develops a short written viewpoint about how the author's personality has influenced the character development, shared in the group blog for feedback from peers and the teacher. This feedback is considered to improve the written response.

The final phase of this unit is very student driven as they explore and select the digital tool to create the multimodal advertisement. The teacher responds to student requests for direction to take with creating the presentation rather than providing a set selection of tools that they must choose from. This process allows the teacher to identify groups that require more scaffolding while allowing other groups to develop their own creative solutions. Direction and scaffolding is provided to ensure that safe and ethical guidelines are being used when accessing and using online material. Links to useful websites to help them with this process are made available in the EdStudio. Models are provided on how to locate appropriate resources and attribute materials if necessary. The final presentation is initially shared in the class EdStudio, but then being made available and promoted on the school website. The embedded Glogster is an example of a final product.

For our students to reach their potential, we need to aim for them to be able to engage in higher order thinking processes and skills. When digital tools are used for identified purposes that meet the specific needs of authentic tasks, this gives students the chance to engage in application, analysis, evaluation and creative processes, Blooms' Digital higher order thinking skills. By designing learning sequences and providing access to appropriate digital tools to meet the needs of the task, rather than choosing the technology and then a task to utilise it, we are giving our students the chance to develop the skills needed in this century.

Australian Curriculum. 2013. Information and communication technology (ICT) capability, retrieved 29th March 2014 from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/GeneralCapabilities/information-and-communication-technology-capability/introduction/introduction

Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. (2007). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK): Confronting the

wicked problems of teaching with technology. Retrieved 8th April 2014 from www.aace.org/conf/site/mishra_invited.doc

TPACK Reflections

Content Knowledge
Much of my teaching career has been as a Support Teacher: Literacy and Numeracy. My main role is to support classroom teachers to cater for individual student needs focusing on literacy and numeracy skills. My strengths lie in identifying the necessary literacy and numeracy skills students need to develop to be able to access the class curriculum and to provide appropriate program support for these students. I haven't developed a deep knowledge base all of the Key Learning Areas (KLAs), but instead have developed the ability to identify the literacy or numeracy demands of a KLA in order to provide specific support in these domains. The rollout of the Australian Curriculum and the provision of Achievement Standards that identify the knowledge and understanding that students should demonstrate at particular stages of their education have provided clear starting points for teachers to use when identifying the areas of support for their students. Many teachers benefit from support to be able to select appropriate learning tasks and sequence of activities to assist students to meet the achievement standards as well as cater for students achieving above the year level standards.

Pedagogy
Pedagogical knowledge is an area of relative strength for me. As the focus of my ST:LaN role, I support and work with teachers to provide appropriate classroom tasks to cater for a range of student abilities differentiation of class programs and assisting with whole school data analysis and student assessment. Being able to assist teachers by working with small groups to develop specific skills using a range of teaching methods and approaches is an area I am confident with. Over the last several years, there has developed greater focus on mentoring teachers, so I have strengthened my skills in this area. For the past several years, I have worked very closely with another ST:LaN teacher at 2 schools and this work environment has increased our personal skills as having the opportunity to collaborate on ideas and programs has improved resulted in improved student outcomes. An area of improvement is to develop a larger bank of skills to support high achieving students to ensure student engagement.

Technology
When it comes to technological knowledge, I am confident using a range of software and online tools to substitute, augment and modify learning tasks in terms of the SAMR model. My goal is to develop the ability to redefine learning tasks using technology. My biggest challenge is that I get really inspired by some of the ideas that are being shared, but then feel disheartened when seemingly being blocked by the lack of capable infrastructure and tools that can be accessed in my teaching context. In my current role with Project 600, a significant amount of time is having to be devoted to supporting schools and teachers who are struggling with poor bandwidth and trouble shooting technical issues with the online platform that has recently been upgraded. Trouble shooting solutions with new/unfamiliar tools is an area of strength as I like to always challenge myself to work out how to solve issues and work out solutions for myself, but also find it very beneficial to trouble shoot as part of a team. Unfortunately, too much time and energy is being devoted to this aspect which then reduces the time available to develop programs using digital pedagogy.