Healthy Lifestyles
This unit is designed to encourage students to live healthy lifestyles, create awareness of this current social issue and develop their skills with multimodal literacies.
Please refer to Technology Note:
- Discipline: English
- Topic: Argumentative Texts
- Prior knowledge:
- Age range: 14-15
- Publisher: Self-published
This learning element focuses on exploring the concept of change in relation to natural and processed materials. In everyday life change is constantly occurring. Experiments are used to predict and investigate what causes change and how and why change occurs e.g. chocolate melts in the sun, water evaporates from puddles, pasta becomes soft in boiling water.
Keeping a class science journal is an integral part of this learning element and assists in connecting science with literacy.
- Discipline: Science, Technology and English
- Topic: Investigating different forms of matter. Record and report in a scientific manner.
- Prior knowledge: Students have had many learning experiences working in groups to investigate and solve problems. They are familiar with simple procedural text forms.
- Age range: 5-7
- Publisher: Self-published
Students will read and experience different types of poetry and then write and type poems themselves. They will choose a poem to publish and then type the poem and create an accompanying picture, manipulate these on PowerPoint or a similar tool, and then publish their poetry on VoiceThread for an audience.
- Discipline: Language Arts/Writing Workshop/Technology
- Topic: Poetry and VoiceThread
- Prior knowledge: The students will have done some prior poetry work and have some beginning typing skills.
- Age range: 9-10
- Publisher: Self-published
This learning element focuses on a multimodal text which combines a narrative text and an information text. Students read and respond to the text, drawing out similarities and differences, and analyse the visual and linguistic grammar of the text. Students then create their own multimodal texts.
- Discipline: English
- Topic: A literacy study for 9-12 year olds
- Prior knowledge: Other stories, including traditional fairy tales; how to reference a text using the Harvard style.
- Age range: 9-12
- Publisher: Lanyon Cluster of Schools
This element introduces teachers to the theory and practice of the Learning by Design lesson planner. With Learning by Design, teachers use new social media to create dynamic learning experiences for students (in the form of Learning Elements) while also professionally documenting their work in curriculum and instruction and making it sharable with other teachers and students. Sharing work with the greater teaching community is encouraged, but always optional.
- Discipline: Education
- Topic: Educational Technologies
- Prior knowledge: Curriculum and Instruction
- Age range: Adult
- Publisher: Common Ground Learning by Design Training
The goal of this multimodal project is to investigate persuasive techniques and audience in commercial and print advertisements. The students will apply their knowledge of persuasive techniques and audience to conduct a brand analysis, where they view and critically analyze several different advertisements for the same product, looking for trends in strategy and audience, and commenting on the effectiveness of the given ads.
After projects are completed, students will use their knowledge of the Readers Apprenticeship Readers' Response prompts to view and comment on their peers' projects, offering praise, questions, and tips for improvement. Projects are posted online and commenting occurs through the commenting capabilities of Edmodo.
- Discipline: Language Arts, Multimedia
- Topic: Persuasive Communication Strategies, Collaborative Discussion, Group Work, Multimedia Literacy
- Prior knowledge: Students have studies some persuasive techniques in the past, and have also written persuasive essay. s
- Age range: 11-14
- Publisher: Self-published
Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem fox provides students with the opportunity to define the term memory and explore how objects can be used as memory triggers. Students are explicitly taught the text type of personal narratives with the unit culminating in writing an autobiograhy scaffolded through Mem Fox's autobigraphy. Students experience first hand how memories can be recorded through people's stories (listening to guest speakers share their life story)and artefacts; visiting Canberra's historic Blundell's Cottage and St John's School House Museum.
- Discipline: History and English
- Topic: Stories, families, autobiographies, museums
- Prior knowledge:
- Age range: 5-7
- Publisher: Self-published
Through a novel study of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, students explore issues such as control, reality entertainment, materialism and genetic engineering, and satire as a literary device. Wikis are used to build an online learning community.
- Discipline: English
- Topic: Novel Study and Literary Elements
- Prior knowledge: Advertising techniques
- Age range: 14-15
- Publisher: Lanyon Cluster of Schools
This learning element is based on the novel "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Dai Sijie. The novel is a semi-autobiographical account of the author's experiences of being re-educated during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Students explore its themes, characters and historical context through collaborative discussions and participating in an online learning community.
- Discipline: English
- Topic: Novel study, reading, social media and Chinese history
- Prior knowledge: Essay Writing
- Age range: 14-15
- Publisher: Lanyon Cluster of Schools
World War II: 1939 - 1945.
- Discipline: History
- Topic: History of World War II
- Prior knowledge: Political, economical circumstances of previous period
- Age range: 15-18
- Publisher: Self-published