The Education Services Australia website links to an enormous range of resources for teachers and parents. I already knew about Scootle, and have used Learning Objects (LOs) from this repository before.

Choose three different areas of professional interest on the Online Resources page and locate one learning object in each. Consider the intended learning for each – do you think this can be achieved?

Write a brief reflective evaluation on how you could incorporate LOs into your current or future practice.

Scootle > Super Stories: The Abandoned House: Nouns and Adjectives

I chose to search for a LO on Scootle about editing a piece of writing, as this is my focus for next term’s writing groups. I narrowed my search using a Year 4 Content Descriptor within the Australian Curriculum – ACELY1695 – Reread and edit for meaning by adding, deleting or moving words or word groups to improve content and structure. I chose The Abandoned House because my group of boys enjoy the horror genre.

Intended Learning

• Students relate the nature and strength of evaluative stance in texts to language and multimodal choices.
• Students analyse and compare the use of grammatical forms such as nouns and adjectives to evoke an emotional response from readers and listeners across a range of texts.
• Students analyse how particular language choices can give more or less emphasis, intensity, force or focus to evaluations.
• Students investigate how images influence the reader to adopt certain evaluative positions about a text.

I liked that once you actually started editing, the LO provided a couple of nouns to choose from and explained why those choices improved or didn’t improve the text. There is lots of scaffolding, and once the learning is complete, you could move into a more open task, depending on the students’ understanding. My writing group often finish a writing task and believe that it is complete, without editing or improving anything! I feel like this LO is a good place to start.

The intended learning outcomes are a little bit beyond my group’s academic level. I do think the LO would help them to analyse and compare the power of different nouns and adjectives, as well as investigate the images and power of certain language choices.

Student Wellbeing Hub > Be Deadly Online

I chose to search the Student Wellbeing Hub because my wellbeing teacher frequently comments on the lack of resources available to her. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it especially easy to find resources of interest using the filters. For example, there was not a whole lot about growth mindset, persistence or resilience, which is our school’s current focus.

In the end, I chose Be Deadly Online. I like that it links to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cross-curriculum Priority. I watched a  video called ‘Dumb Stuff’, about a boy who makes a video about doing silly things, and then he gets fired because he was filmed in his work shirt.

Intended Learning

• Understand the concept of respect in the context of technology use.
• Critically analyse the impact of your actions on yourself, others and your family/community when using technology.

I think this LO would be very helpful in generating a discussion about respect for yourself and for others, as well as responsible use of technology, in an upper primary / lower secondary context. Students would engage in critical thinking, and personal and social capability.

The video is animated, uses humour and would appeal to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and student who do not identify as ATSI would get an insight into the culture in a contemporary, everyday context.

Digital Technologies Hub > Quick, Draw!

I went into the Digital Technologies Hub to simply explore. It was far easier to find LOs of interest in this repository, compared to the Student Wellbeing Hub. I found a game called Quick, Draw!

The keywords identified for the LO included Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I think this LO would be a fun way to generate some discussion around these topics, especially for primary students. It is fast-paced and students would enjoy the challenge of beating the clock and drawing successfully.

Intended Learning

• Explain how student solutions and existing information systems meet common personal, school or community needs.
• Explain how student solutions and existing information systems are sustainable and meet current and future local community needs

As the Digital Technologies curriculum is a little foreign to me, I’m not sure how I would use this LO to achieve these learning outcomes.