Comparing Ancient Greece with Modern Australia (Part 1)

I’m a little bit early with my CGLearner and LbD post, but I’ve been working really hard to write the unit up as we’ve started teaching it. I began the unit on Wednesday and both classea have had a really interesting reaction to the beginning of the unit. The unit begins with engaging students by asking them to think about how the government controls them. This leads to a giant list of laws that exist in our society.

Students then look at how these laws are made in Australia.

This diagram was made by Linda Palin with help from the following documents:

Parliament: An Overview

A Multi-Tiered System: Governing Australia

Students are then given scenarios where they discuss what Australia would be like if there weren’t laws. Both classes have had some really interesting discussions in table groups. All groups were able to express their ideas, commenting on positives and negatives. Now for some classes this might not seem difficult, but I teach 2 very beautiful but interesting classes. Both classes are (still) very broken up into small groups. They are such different and diverse groups that it can often be difficult to get them to discuss without their being arguments. Today however they were able to express their ideas really clearly to each other. And they listened and respected each others ideas.

We then moved into a circle and used the circle time strategy to allow all students to discuss and share their ideas. Students expressed some really interesting ideas. Once again we did seem to go a little off task in the red class and begin discussing what we would do if we were in a prison for life …. Anywho!

Students quickly completed a PMI outlining their ideas about government.

Students were then made accountable for their learning and discussion and had to write a PEC paragraph outlining their ideas and thoughts. Below are some examples of their PEC paragraph responses. Please note that these were written in the last ten minutes of class from 2:50 – 3pm.

Peta

I think it is important to have some laws but not as many. What we need is more freedom in Australia. We need laws to control people so they don’t go murder people etc and not get punished. We would have less people in Australia. I think is we had less rules people wouldn’t be as bad because some crazy people feel the need to break them. In my opinion my resolution would be to have less rules to make Australia a better place.

Jack

I think today’s discussion was good because we talked about laws that I think we should have and some I didn’t want. My tables scenario was what id we didn’t have to wear seatbelts? And I thought it would be a bad thing because lots of people would die but it would be better for the economy because window people would get more business and less pollution. The main question was what if the world had no laws? I reckon it would be good because I wouldn’t have to go to school and I could drive and steal and be rich and it wouldn’t have any consequences.

Kristy

I think we need laws. It is important to have laws because lots of people could die from speeding and stabbings, because you wouldn’t go to jail for it. So people would do it. Laws are also important because children need an education for you future. Without laws there would be deaths and you could do anything you wanted. I think we need laws for a safe and nice environment.

I think the students are going to continue to really enjoy this unit.

Using CGLearner to write this learning element has been ever easier than ever before. After having an epiphany an wowowoooo (the sound of my head and angels) moment …

I realised that I could use screen capture to take a picture of the retrieval charts taht we were using in the element save them in paint as a jpeg and upload them to www.photobucket.com . From here I was able to grab the URL for the picture and add it to the learning element. This has made me really happy! Because it means I can be even more explicit when writing.

Writing this learning element is different to the ones I have written before. It is the first unit I have written for year 7, while I have updated units for year 7 this was the first one I had done from scratch. It is also the first team I have worked with that hasn’t really just been Rachael and myself. I found it interesting to write the learning element with different people. My only frustration probably lies with peoples lack of faith (for lack of a better word) to use new technologies like CGLearner. It isn’t difficult to just login (sorry it’s term 4 tolerance levels are low!) But other than that I have really enjoyed writing this element. And I think that the students have really enjoyed it and will continue to do so!

Below is the URL to learning element, this should automatically update as I go along …. (fingers crossed)

YESTERDAY AND TODAY