Week V

Week four was study break so we had no lectures or workshops that week. However I was at home trying to put the finishing touches on my website, getting ready for it to be submitted on the Monday of week 5. Thankfully I had it finished and submitted on time and could put my attention and focus fully on my classes in week five.

The Lecture

In our week five lecture we went into further detail about Authentic tasks. The ways that the education system has changed were discussed and what elements make a task authentic and what doesn't. We also had a look at some examples of inappropriate activities for classrooms. A basic idea of authentic learning is that the task matters most. Students will learn to a better degree if they are involved in their learning process, as against being passive and just taking in information and writing answers to questions. Educational research has shown that efficient learning ideas have changed from a instructivist, transmission of knowledge and knowledge reproduction to a constructivist, active construction of knowledge, where students construct knowledge themselves. This form of learning is accomplished by engaging in complex, relevant tasks that explore a subject in depth. Tasks need to be more collaborative with a teacher acting more as a coach than as an expert so students can direct their own learning. Assessment should be based on the task and less of a standardised testing format. Tasks should be less academic and more engaging.
We later looked  at different tasks and we discussed if each task would be classified as an authentic task, tasks that were straightforward and in which information was given to students or students just had to solve problems were not authentic tasks. If a task looks at a subject from multiple angles, puts you in someone else's shoes, gives you an in depth look at a subject or uses multiple aspects to complete a task then it is probably authentic. Some examples of such tasks are digital stories, adapting plays to suit different cultures, and studying the lives of soldiers who fought in wars. All these things can be looked at from multiple perspectives and are in depth tasks, students can be highly engaged with it and will learn more than from standard information transmission.

How To Lecture

In our how to lecture this week we discussed how to go about task two. We discussed questions about what will make task two be accomplished successfully. We looked at examples of possible contexts we could use for task two and we were guided through the possible resources we could use.

In the Workshop

In our workshop this week we were put in groups to discuss and decide on the context we will use for task two. Some people in my group had an idea for what their context wanted to be but didn't know how to present it. Together as a group we gave ideas to each other and supported each other by giving feedback to their ideas. In the end we all had a path we were going to go down and from their we carried on with our task.

Week five went well, I learnt a lot (as stated above) and managed to make a good start on task two by deciding on my context.

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