Much of our reading to date has been about physical space, but there are also circumstances where we may be revamping virtual spaces. For example I have two blogs, one for each campus of the school, which we started several years ago. We have had several new staff members for short terms so the workload has fallen on my shoulders – hence the sites are well out of date.  I am very conscious that I need to revamp them and ensure that the design meets the learning needs.

The Primary Campus Blog is in the worst condition because I don’t actually teach there any more. The Secondary Campus Blog is marginally better. I also have a wiki for our staff where I collect and very loosely curate information to assist with teaching, which has been neglected lately. Once the physical space has been dealt with to the best of the budgetary and time constraints, I am aiming to apply some of our design processes from this course to these.

Simultaneously with the physical space I am implementing some ideation into my Year 12 History Revolutions class. I have been concerned since my professional learning session with Ewan earlier this year about the amount of paper that can be used ideating for design. After testing a number of solutions I stumbled onto a really good one which had spin off learning that was completely unexpected, and could not have been planned.

I bought a box of 40 big plastic blocks from the local toyshop. I grabbed a pile of whiteboard markers and I headed for class. Once the excitement settled, this is what we did:

In two groups (I only have 7 students) they were given half the set of blocks. They were told to write on one face of the blocks only, and to use the bigger block (the size shown in the image above) for major events and the smaller blocks (half the size) for less significant events. They were then told to make a timeline like their typed timeline with the chronological basis of first event at the top and last at the bottom. One group used all their blocks, the other one didn’t.

And this group didn’t:

This group also wrote on the other side (naughty!) by putting the social pyramid onto the block, with the Tsar at the top and the peasants at the bottom.

The next task was to re-order the blocks so that the most significant events leading to the 1917 revolution were at the top and the least significant at the bottom. The group that used all their blocks then asked if the combined impact of a number of smaller events (smaller blocks) was greater than the impact of some of the bigger one off events.

Their second construction looked like this:

The other group found when they reordered their chronological constructions that the social pyramid, which should not have been on the other side, ended up with the tsar on the bottom! Sheer fluke but very true. I will be using this again with my Year 12 class. I think it would have application for processes that can be linear. In terms of Library lessons we’re thinking we might use it to teach basic Dewey.