Miss W. and her Smartboard

I do quite a bit of research based learning in my classroom as I feel too often students are spoonfed lots of knowledge but not taught the skills to think for themselves. They wait for either the teacher or a parent to give them the book or page number to find the information. So I was very interested in the article by Graham Wegner who tells the reader about research based learning in his school. Personally, I love teaching the research process first to the whole class, so they realise they have to set questions, find both primary and secondary resources, justify their decisions about the big question then finally present to their peers. Students then keep a journal (maybe they will be answering my blog posts this year), organize interview times with me and plan their long term goals with regard to the topic they have chosen. Setting their goals is often a problem but practice does make it easier.

Not much time devoted to writing and research today, at least not of the blogging kind. Instead, I have spent about five hours at the Matron’s Cottage of the Cascades Female Factory transcribing conduct records for female convicts arriving in Van Diemen’s Land in 1839 on the ship “Hindostan”. As part of my genealogy, I have found four male and four female convicts in my family. There are many records online for researching convicts sent to Australia. Presently, on SBS TV, they are showing the series “Who do you think you are?” and I found the first Australian episode with Jack Thompson enthralling especially when he found he had a convict in his background. “Australian Royalty”, he exclaimed.