presentation | OpenSTEM Pty Ltd

This Week in HASS – term 4, week 8

Well, the end of term is in sight! End of year reporting is in full swing and the Understanding Our World® activities are designed to keep students engaged whilst minimising requirements for teachers, especially over these critical weeks. The current activities for all year levels are tailored to require minimal teaching, allowing teacher aides and other helpers to assist students while teachers can be free to concentrate on reporting and other requirements. All year levels have now passed the threshold of completing all curriculum material for the year for all HASS subjects as well as Science, so no more formal assessment is needed. The final weeks are focused on fun, whilst carrying the themes covered earlier in the term, and year, forwards, so that the fun enhances the learning, rather than detracting from it.

Foundation/Prep/Kindy to Year 3

Our youngest students in standalone Foundation/Prep/Kindy classes (Unit F.4) or integrated with Year 1 (Unit F-1.4) are doing the final preparations for their play next week. Costumes should be finalised, whilst the students practise their lines and using props. Those classes which have chosen not to dress-up should be finalising their drawings of their characters and the equipment they could use. Students will say their lines and explain their drawings and what their character is doing. Students in Years 1 (Unit 1.4), 2 (Unit 2.4) and 3 (Unit 3.4) are also preparing for their presentation or dramatisation next week. Students in Year 1 are considering the roles of each member of their role-play family group – who does the cooking or cleaning, who works outside the home? Students in Year 2 are considering the role of technology in the lives of their chosen group – what technology do they use for which purposes? Students should also be encouraged to consider where this group lives and how practical it would be to travel to where they live from where the students live – what technology would be involved? Students in Year 3 are considering the roles of their characters in the community where their chosen group lives and whether any representatives of similar groups are present in their local community.

Years 3 to 6

Students in Years 3 (Unit 3.8), 4 (Unit 4.4), 5 (Unit 5.4) and 6 (Unit 6.4) are reaping the benefits of their class election and moving on to plan a celebration for the last week of term. The theme of the celebration is “Diversity in Australia” and students will look back to the migrant group they studied earlier in the term to gain ideas to add to the celebration. Teachers can decide whether food will be included in this celebration, or not. If not, it is recommended that students prepare a menu of the sort of foods that their group might have at a celebration. Other aspects to include may be music, symbols and decorations or even national dress. Students in Year 3 will have chosen from a wide range of possible migrant groups earlier in the term or may also choose an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander group. Students in Year 4 will have concentrated on groups from South-East Asia and Australasia. Students in Year 5 will have chosen a group from Europe, Britain or Western Asia, whilst students in Year 6 will have chosen mainly groups of migrants from Asia. Some students may wish to include Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander cultural representations in the celebration.

To complement this celebration, some students may have plants, from their Scientific Investigation, which can now be used in the celebration, either contributing resources, such as tomatoes, or perhaps flowering or having other characteristics which represent a migrant group.

This Week in HASS – term 2, week 7

This week students are starting to round off their main body of assessable work for the term. Older students are completing and starting to present their presentations, while younger students have posters and models to finish off.

Foundation/Prep/Kindy to Year 3

Students in our stand-alone Foundation/Prep/Kindy unit (F.2) are continuing to explore with their senses this week. While still working on their model or collage for their Favourite Place, they are using their sense of Smell to consider which aromas they like or dislike. Teachers (and students) can bring in a range of things with different smells to explore in class. Ideas for these are given in the Teacher’s Handbook. An important part of this investigation is considering how one can represent one’s favourite smells in the model or collage – students might try to draw the objects associated with the smells, or see if they can find creative alternatives to represent this sense.

Students in integrated Foundation/Prep/Kindy and Year 1 classes (Unit F.6) and those in Years 1 (Unit 1.2), 2 (Unit 2.2) and 3 (Unit 3.2) are completing their posters to be displayed next week. These posters cover topics of local significance – either local history information, or dealing with issues, such as littering or the need for play equipment. As the students work on the posters, teachers are holding discussions with them on responsibility for different issues. The delegation of responsibility to members of the community, local government, other authorities, people who use the facilities, the school P&C, the students etc. should be discussed in class, so that students start to understand how people have different responsibilities in different situations. The teacher can also revisit issues of responsibility in the classroom – what are the students responsible for? What is the teacher responsible for? What is the school responsible for? These discussions are an important means of allowing the students to interact and practise group discussion skills, as well as helping them to think about responsibilities.

Years 3 to 6

Students in Year 3 (Unit 3.6) are completing their presentation on an extreme climate explorer and may start presenting it to the class this week. Year 4 students (Unit 4.2) are presenting on their explorer of Africa and South America. Year 5 students (Unit 5.2) are presenting on their chosen explorer from North America; and Year 6 students (Unit 6.2) are presenting on their chosen explorer from Asia. The remaining 3 weeks of this unit are allocated to the presentations, to ensure enough time for these to be given in full. The presentations should cover all the aspects raised over previous weeks and answered in the Student Workbook – the environments and geography of the areas explored; sustainability issues, such as extinction of animals and changes in local environments; characteristics of the countries involved in the explorations; reasons for explorations and how these created the background which led to the settlement of Australia and the role of indigenous people, as well as impact on indigenous people and their environments. The presentation is thus a comprehensive body of work.

LibreOffice Code Quality

Simon Phipps has written an article for InfoWorld about the latest code defect review of LibreOffice by Coverity.

Coverity has tools to check computer program code for many faults. These tools are offered commercially (and thus used by vendors of proprietary software) but they are also specifically made available for Open Source projects. Every once in a while a report is published on this effort, and that is most useful.

As it turns out, LibreOffice has vastly improved the code quality since it started its path about 4 years ago, now featuring one of the lowest fault rates of any large program/suite. OpenOffice, the codebase from which it started, had many features but also plenty of bugs. The LibreOffice project has clearly taken that lesson and done its homework. Naturally, being an open source project, it’s not just one small group of people at one organisation working on this, but many people globally.

As Simon writes:

While an open source license on code is no automatic guarantee of quality, by its nature it allows evaluation of quality and encourages collaborative efforts toward improvement.

LibreOffice is not Microsoft Office. It uses a different approach in many aspects of its user interface. But, by and large, provides very similar functionality. It’s probably safe to say that the user interface differences between LbreOffice and MSOffice are smaller than the differences between two MSOffice versions. Each takes some getting used to, but it’s often not a drama.

And LibreOffice can read and write MS Office documents. I prefer LibreOffice, because using it does not require either me or anyone else to buy licenses for a particular version of a particular product – because we do know that nasty things often happen when opening a document, spreadsheet or presentation on a different version.

For education, it is very important to have open formats and free tools available – it enables everybody to access the technology. Not just at schools, but also in the home and beyond. Documents get shared, so it’s all tied together.

LibreOffice is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux – you can download it from http://www.libreoffice.org/ although if you run Linux it’s probably already installed and you may just have been using it as your regular office suite already!