Category Archives: Lessons & Units

Individual lessons, and lessons grouped into complete units of work.

Lessons & Units

Computer Systems

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This unit is my first attempt to introduce students to computer systems in a thorough, formal and organised manner, and it has proved both educational and enjoyable for both myself and (I believe) my students. It uses a very simple layered model (which I call the Four Layer Model) to help students understand how hardware, software, networks and people each function as parts of complex computer systems. For my Year 9 students this was their first opportunity to really work with computer hardware (they had to reassembly old PCs) and software (they had to install Ubuntu Linux). It also gave them new insights into how the Internet works, and finally a glimpse of the complexities involved in human use of technology at the individual and group levels. Hopefully this unit has managed to demystify those little plastic and metal boxes they spend so much time staring at!

If you are planning on running this unit, be prepared to answer lots of interesting questions, and fix lots of problems. Let me know if you need any help. The files below should provide you with all of the information you need:

Lessons & Units

Teach A Teacher (Mac Edition)

This unit starts with assumption that students are better at ICT than teachers, and that the teachers at your school need help. Students work individually but collaboratively to learn about various aspects of the Mac (both hardware and software). This information is then used to populate a pre-structured wiki, essentially creating an online manual for others to use. At the end of the unit, students need to work with a partner to line up a two-on-one session where they help a teacher to improve their ICT skills by using the wiki. I recently ran this unit simultaneously with 60 11-12 year old Y7 students, and they adapted to the collaborative nature of the wiki fantastically. At the end of the unit, when they had all taught their teachers, I received excellent feedback on their performance from my colleagues. It also got them really thinking and talking about the computers they use every day, and what they can do with them.

The material below should be all that you need to deliver this unit at your school:

Lessons & Units

Learning Online

The aim of this unit is to equip students in Years 7, 8 and 9 with the skills needed to manage their own learning in an online world, including research, presentation, reflection and communication. The unit centers around student blogs, and the integration of other technologies.Whilst it is an ICT unit, it can easily be adapted to suite a wide range of subjects.

On completion of the project students should each have their own blog, in which they have collected and organised their work as well as a range of resources from around the Web. Ideally, students will have begun to understand what they can do online, and how this is constrained by copyright and educational fair use. Some of the following materials may be useful in the teaching of this unit:

  • Learning Online – general overview of the unit.
  • Assessment Rubric – a simple rubric to aid teachers and students in assessment.
  • Anatomy of a Blog – a visual guide to some key elements of a blog. Based on my demo blog.
  • Class Completion Record – a spreadsheet for tracking the progress of a number of classes.
  • Student Completion Record – a spreadsheet for use in one-on-one progress checks with students, which ideally will be carried out towards the end of the unit.
  • Unit Summary for Students – a summary document providing a recap of everything covered in the unit for students to use in their own time, to supplement their in-class learning.

I have just completed running this with 6 classes across Years 7, 8 and 9, and it has been generally successful. All students now have a blog with some content, and the majority have met most of the criteria. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I ran the unit over 6 weeks, and so some aspects receive less emphasis than they ideally would have. The students generally entered into the spirit of blogging, although some mistakenly linked the online nature of the work to informal writing. This lead to an emphasis being placed on writing in a style appropriate to the intended audience. There were only one or two instances of students writing inappropriately on their blogs, or those of their classmates. These actions generally seemed to be borne of naivety rather than malice. In order to moderate the blogs, I collected all the post and comment RSS feeds into a reader, and I periodically check to see what students have been writing.

Listed below are an exemplary piece of work from each of the year groups who participated in this project:

Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in teaching this unit: I am more than happy to help where I can. If you have taught this unit, I would love to hear how you got on.

Lessons & Units

One Day to eCommerce

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One Day to eCommerce is a project designed to enable a group of Year 9 IPT students at North Sydney Boy’s High School (NSBHS) to develop eCommerce sites in a single day. It is ambitious and challenging, and aims to leverage the great flexibility of Drupal. The project was delivered in mid-May 2010, and despite lots of problems (and chances to learn how to solve them), all 9 groups managed to create an online shop. Two of the groups even managed to configure a credit card payment system. The materials on this page are identical to the ones used in the project, and are available for any teachers who might wish to run this program at their own school. Be warned though, you need to be technically proficient with Drupal and LAMP stacks, or have the assistance of someone who is.

This one-day project is based on the Drupal IPT Project I ran at NSBHS during my first practicum last year.

Materials

  • Presentation (Apple Keynote)
  • Presentation (Microsoft PowerPoint)
  • Student Materials – this is a large file (31.8MB), and so may take some time to download. Due to its size it is hosted offiste with Dropbox, so don’t worry about the external link. Depending on your OS, you might also need an extra application to unzip it. Please note that these materials are not covered by the site’s CC License, as it contains copyrighted images. These are used under assumed fair use for education.
  • Required Modules – this image file can be used to help students work out which modules to enable.

Feedback

If you have participated in the One Day To eCommerce incursion at NSBHS, we would love to have your feedback. Please use this feedback form to tell me what you think.

Support

If you are a student who wants help with this material, or a teacher looking to implement this project yourself, please feel free to contact me. The following may be helpful if you decided to run this project yourself:

Lessons & Units

Drupal IPT Project

Having completed my first practicum I thought it would be useful to post the major artifact that came out of it: the unit of work plan for the project I ran with my two HSC classes. This complete document details a proejct whereby students in the HSC IPT Preliminary course work in teams to redevelop their school website using the Drupal Content Management System (CMS).

The unit can be downloaded from our here.

The main aims behind this project, derived from and taught through the syllabus outcomes outlined in the unit of work, were are to challenge students with the following aims ideas:

  • undertake work that poses a significant challenge;
  • work in a situation that is more like industry than school, including;
    • engage in independent problem solving;
    • work towards developing a functioning system;
    • engage in effective time management;
    • interact professionally with a “client” (played by the teacher);
  • produce effective written communication
  • consider their new system from the perspective of its users.
  • meet specified syllabus outcomes

Whilst the document plans for 4 weeks of work, it eventually took 6 weeks to deliver the unit, so some modification will most likely be required. Do keep in mind that this was designed to really challenge students at an academically selective school, and so may require customisation for use with other student groups.

The final presentation of student-developed websites showed that students had met many of the expected outcomes, and were, in many cases, capable of producing functioning websites suitable for use by a school. Students provided feedback suggesting that they valued the learning involved in the unit.

Remember, this work is published under a Creative Commons BY-SA license and I encourage anyone interested in it to take it and use it (provided you meet the simple license requirements to attribute the work back to me and to share your resulting work in the same way I have shared mine). Have fun!