Learning+Design+Rationale

Learning Design Rationale The YouTube clip below discusses the need for teachers to use up to date technologies in the classroom to engage students and to become 21st century learners and teachers themselves. Using ICT within the classroom is not a choice, it needs to happen in order to connect more with our 21st century learners.

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The Web Quest being used has been designed for a year 5 cohort, various learning styles are present within the class with the key learning area being history.

The web quest has been chosen as the main interactive teaching tool for this learning sequence as it will allow for the students to maintain individuality, be creative and encourage the students to develop ownership of their learning and completed work, (March, 2012). The web quest also allows for differentiation within the class by the students being able to work at their own pace to create a presentation that is a collaborative piece of work, but also allowing for individual work to be completed. It also allows for peer teaching within the collaborative groups. Using an interactive digital learning tool will encourage the students to become engaged more in the learning of these historical events by allowing them to see the tasks as authentic and worthwhile, as students are using digital technologies in their everyday lives outside of school, (Marzano et al. 1997). In Bloom's revised taxonomy, it is stated that in for teachers to encourage higher order thinking the students should be learning in a certain order. Firstly before students are able to understand something, they need to remember it, to apply an idea or concept it must be understood and then a concept needs to be analysed before it can be evaluated. Each part of the learning being scaffolded so the learning is built up layer by layer ensuring a deeper understanding, (Churches, 2011).

When designing the web quest the scaffolding was taken into account and placed in a specific order with the aim of getting the students to their (ZPD), zone of proximal development, Vygotsky's (as cited in Snowman, 2010), belief was that by scaffolding correctly, a teacher can engage the students more therefore encouraging the students to become hungry to learn and more inclined to work and learn more independantly. The use of ICTs was important in helping the students to reach their ZPD.

The students will be encouraged through the scaffolded web quest, to make informed inferences in their final summative task, the presentations, by taking part in internet based research regarding how the expeditions helped or hindered the development of the Australian colony and the affects these expeditions had on the indigenous peoples of those areas.