Rita Angus, John Britten, Annie Crummer, Charles Pharazyn, Charlotte Badger and Betty Guard are famous, not so famous, and even infamous New Zealanders who can all be found at Te Papa Museum, as students from Brooklyn School recently discovered.
As part of Digital Opportunities CHaOS Project, Te Papa and Brooklyn School are coming together, and integrating technology and the vast resources of the museum to develop students’ research and inquiry, and ICT skills.
“We’re introducing them to inquiry learning and the technologies they will use at their level, and also introducing them to habits of mind. We’re using Te Papa and the people they (the students) study as the context for them to use the Tablets to gather the information they need,” says CHaOS project facilitator and Learning Enhancement Associates director, Dean Stanley.
The Year 5 and 6 students will have three sessions at Te Papa where they’ll research information on their allocated New Zealander by using Te Papa’s resources, such as the museum’s website, library, exhibition stands, and front and back of house staff. All gathered information will be written up and stored on the HP Tablet, and used to develop an argument for or against why their New Zealander should be represented on a thousand dollar bill.
Te Papa tailor-made Brooklyn School’s programme to fit with the project’s use of the Tablets, and developmental learning objectives, that include ‘Habits of Mind’, which are a set of learning behaviours that progress a student systematically through the learning process. There are 16 Habits of Mind including persistence, applying knowledge to new situations, and responding with wonderment and awe.
The co-joint project finishes in April, and will culminate in the class displaying their findings in a poster display at Te Papa.
For more information on the Habits of Mind, go to http://www.brooklynprimary.school.nz/CHaOS.html
