A day in the life of Pedagogy 2.0...

This is how I see a day of changing pedagogical ideas in a primary classroom (year 6):

Students start the morning by signing their name off the class register using the SmartBoard (this sounds mundane, but takes the form of students moving their names into a speech bubble that has been created by the teacher - students can also edit the font and colours of their name, depending on how they are feeling that day). First up there is a fitness session that is tied in with maths: the students need to find an average time for running three laps of the oval (to be put into an upcoming assembly item). Once the students have run and gotten three times, they return to the classroom and as a group come up with the number of laps that can be done in 45 and 20 minutes - this acts as both a lesson in finding averages, changing units and how to use Microsoft Excel.

We now move on to an integrated literacy/Society & Environment session with students viewing ABC's Behind The News (BTN) and the students pick out relevant stories to further investigate. Today's task is based on the note-taking process, whereas previous tasks have been on writing reports or extrapolating the original story. Using one of the reports on BTN, one involving the furore over Peter Garrett's home insulation bungle, we carry out an investigation on why this is such an issue, looking at factors such as what insulation is, how it works, what has gone wrong, the money involved, the politics involved with the aim of making suggestions as to how this problem might be fixed (tying together Science and S&E).

We end the day by practicing the upcoming assembly item, as written by the students and focussing on our recent Healthy Lifestyle unit of work. The students have come up with The Biggest Winner - a TV program based around healthy eating and fitness. The script has been edited as a class (using the SmartBoard) and we are now up to the live performance in the undercover area.

This is partly based on a day I was in school last week, with some minor tweaking of the BTN material. It's interesting to see how student-centred these lessons are and how the use of technology is an accessory to what is actually being learnt. The teacher acts as the driving force, shifting the focus from one subject to the next, with the students doing a lot of investigation and inquiry.