What's our Pedagogy?

As the designing and creating process of this web quest continues through the collaborative effort of our group, I have noticed that via our simple employment of technology in the classroom we have unintentionally addressed and adhered to the three dimensions of the NSW Quality Teaching Framework. This style of pedagogy we are using displays aspects of authentic e-learning by seamlessly integrating our learning of content and assessment and results in promoting high levels of intellectual quality in the students work.

Through giving the students a web quest to complete, team work, maximum participation and the collaboration of ideas is promoted and encouraged. This nurturing environment created between the students, teacher and task creates a high quality learning environment, aimed at improving student’s involvement and deeper understanding of the subject outcomes.  

The concept of a web quest is extremely clever in engaging so that students would chose to research and participate. Our assessment comprises a range of complex tasks to be investigated collaboratively by students over time and further engages students with the real-world relevance regarding the importance of nutrition and lifestyle choices. These elements of authentic learning work harmoniously together to create an engaging and complex task, demanding higher order thinking and intellectual quality of the students.

Through the way we have designed the task and put the students in charge of the health and wellbeing of a hypothetical family (possibly much like their own) it increases the relevance of the task and its importance to the students. This promotes the children to look past just getting a good mark for this assessment and emphasises the significance of their work in helping others as well as themselves and their wider community.

So in summary of this week’s brainstorm regarding our web quest, we have acknowledged that we have employed the Quality Teaching Model as the pedagogical context of our digital artefact and plan to exploit these dimensions in order to create a quality and significant task.