Faculty of Education Sydney University
Mercy College Chatswood
Partnership Project Technology Project
Mercy College Chatswood
This website has been developed through a technology and professional development project involving Sydney University's Faculty of Education Partnerhsips Division and Mercy College Chatwood.
The partnership project has involved a sequence of Stages
Stage 1 Planning and Identification of Needs - A meeting with the School Principal and staff Mrs, Jenny Allen, Jan Wilson, Jenny Wells and Peter Clifford, Mike Horsley and Jacqui Manuel, from the Faculty of Education and Bronwyn Hession, from the CSO Broken Bay was held to identify possible options for integrating ICT into the English and HSIE Curriculum.
Stage 2 Staff Training - A number o f professional development courses were held in the Faculty of Education and at the school to develop the ability of the staff to design web environments to faciltiate the embedding of ICT across the English and HSIE curriculum. Staff included Jenny Wells, Kerry McGonigal, Peter and Jane Housten.
Stage 3 Development of Web based Units of Work - Peter Clifford with assistence from Mat Palmer ( intern from mteach )developed a web based unit of work for Year 10 Commerce. The url for this unit of work can be found on the projects page in this website.
Stage 4 Development of a Communication and Mentoring Project - this was designed for year 10 English and Year 12 Economics and Business Studies students at the school. The website for these projects are to be found at http://alex.edfac.usyd.edu.au/Methods/HSIE/mercy_chat.html ( Economics and Business ) and http://alex.edfac.usyd.edu.au/Methods/HSIE/mercy_chat_english.html ( English ). It was great to see a distance education student from Fiji join in to the chatline on the internet for assistance with his course.
Stage 5 Presentation of Progress at the Mercy Schools Professional Development Day. At this professional development opportunity Peter Clifford from Mercy College and Mike Horsley from the Faculty outlined progress that had been made in the development of the partnership. A web site was created for the professional development opportunity. http://alex.edfac.usyd.edu.au/Methods/HSIE/mercy_talk.html
Stage 6 Action Research Presentation - Peter Clifford developed a powerpoint presentation of his action research project on embedding ICT into a unit of work and reorganising his teaching with year 12. The power point is available online at the following address http://alex.edfac.usyd.edu.au/Methods/HSIE/HTML%20Presentation%20folder/sld001.htm. Peter has subsequently made a video and digital photos of his year 10 commerce class in action on the web.
Stage 7 Bachelor of Education Year 4 Students Develop web based suport units - as the partnership developed Mercy College provided technology practicum places for two Year 4 Bachelor of Education Students, Ayca Emerali and Edina Pervanic. They developed a website for teaching Globalisation topics and assisted year 12 students in developing power point presentations for Economics Topics and Year 12 Assessment.
Stage 8 Internship Student Julie Robinson in English - Julie Robinson, a second year Master of Teaching Internship Intern joined the English Staff for Term 3 2002 and developed some interent support for a range of English topics
Stage 9 An Internet based assessment task to evaluate the Commerce students who had completed the online course was developed. This was designed to use the internet to test not only their topic knowledge but also the computer and internet skills gained by doing the online course. This task can be viewed here. The assessment is at the bottom of the page. This pilot task involved 45 students simultaneously on computer and internet accessing the 1 hour online task. Their work was then saved onto the school intranet, where it was marked and recorded on computer. The only paper used in the whole exercise was a one page analysis of each students results given to each student. Students then accessed the answers of the best students online to compare to their work.
Stage 10 Research Task a year 7 Geography class researched Tornadoes on the internet and saved the best links into an intranet folder where they found an assignment sheet with instructions. The assessment was designed around producing an information sheet on the topic. Many requested to use powerpoint - the impressive presentations can be seen here. Assignments were emailed to the teacher, marked and returned by email. The best were shown to the class and are to be put on the departments internet site for display.. A similar unit has been done on Tsunamis.
Stage 11 Globalisation Unit Year 11 students recently completed a globalisation on line course and made good use of the chatline with University students to gain assistance.
Stage 12 Chatline Use Trial HSC Online Help Year 12 students found the chatline very useful for their final preparation for the HSC. They asked questions and recieved answers from Peter Clifford their teacher, Sydney Uni and other students. The beauty of this was that all students could view each others questions and answers rather than individual assistance by phone or email.
Stage 13 We are working on a plan for further partnership developments.
