Design Briefs

Week 3 - 11th August, 2010

HOW TO MAKE A FROG JUMP?

Design briefs are used to encourage higher order thinking skills in students. It's great for collaboration, co-operation and competition. It's great for engaging your students.

The task for today is how to make a frog jump. The materials will be provided and from that the students in pairs will write up a design brief of the steps they took to make the frog jump. This is helpful because if the frog doesn't jump then they are able to refer back to the design brief and make changes to it.

Once they have figured out how to make the frog jump the students can design a poster with their design brief on it so everyone can see how they made their frog jump.

Materials

• Cardboard


• Picture of a frog


• Rubber band


• Sticky tape


• Glue stick


• Scissors

Important Note: Some students have never been taught how to use scissors so it is important to review this with the students. Most importantly we must show students how to walk when holding scissors and remind them of the danges of flicking rubber bands.

Our next activity we signed into http://www.quia.com/ and we signed up for a 30 days free trial
The process was pretty simple with username and password. Then we just added our name and email address. Once we did this we went into the quizzes pages and came up with our own five question quizzes. It's simple to start quizzes just by clicking on new quiz. Just add a title and desciption of the quiz, then start asking the questions and filling in the anwers. Put them on random so the program will mix the questions and answers up for you.

It's important that the students don't ask questions related to any of their classmates or teachers.

My German quiz url is: http://www.quia.com/quiz/2514030.html

My profile url is: http://www.quia.com/profiles/khibber22

This is a great way to find out what different things your students might be interested and you can also find out who can and can't spell.

Next I did an activity on jumbled words. I did the names of WNBL teams, which not many people had any clue about. I guess my interests vary greatly from others in my class.

Below is an example of some of the words that were jumbled. Do you think you can get the names?

Rief
Felmsa
Rmobseo
Raesrgn
Sacailtp

Job Applications and e-portfolios

PUBLISHER

Today Greg discussed the many aspects we need to be prepared for when we go through the job application. There is an abundance of questions we need to have answers for, including knowing the blueprint, having our e-portfolios ready and writing enough answers and information on the question sheet we are given ten minutes to prepare for when waiting for our interview. It was interesting and somewhat daunting to hear about everything we have to prepare for.

We then moved on to using Microsoft publisher to design brochures which is something we can use with our students in the classroom. It's a great way for students to promote a message they have been working on (e.g recycling, gardening, sporting activity). Using publisher students can create and run a class or year level newsletter that acknowledges birthdays and publishes students work. It is also something that can be used as an assessment. Publisher is a great way to display students work, like in the brochure shown below. Although I have to say the brochure I put together on Italy was not a masterpiece and this is clearly something I need to work on.