Integrating Learning Technologies into the Society & Environment Learning Area
Society & Environment Learning Area Outcomes
The Society and Environment Learning Area Statement and Outcomes and Standards Framework focus on:
- The Investigation Process and the skills of critical enquiry and ethical decision making, through the four stages of planning, conducting, processing and applying.
- The Active Citizenship Values of democratic process, social justice and ecological sustainability students exhibit as they organise and work in school and community groups, participate in service activities, write letters, lobby and represent interests.
- The five sets of conceptual understandings needed by citizens to understand about their society and environment, in the areas of:
- Place and Space
- Resources
- Culture
- Time, Continuity and Change
- Natural and Social Systems
The seven Society & Environment learning outcomes are interrelated in that understandings and values are developed through enquiry learning, which results in students demonstrating behaviours and practices of active citizenship.
Learning Technologies and the Society & Environment Learning Area
The introduction of effective computer-based technologies into Society & Environment classrooms can assist student learning in the Society & Environment outcomes. The critical factor will, however, be the ways in which teachers integrate the technologies into their teaching and learning activities.
In the Society & Environment learning area, whilst it is acknowledged that the new technologies provide intrinsic motivation for many students merely because they are new, they won't survive as entertainment value alone. Nor should we be satisfied with computer-assisted programs and activities that just perform old classroom strategies in different ways.
Using Learning Technologies in an Outcomes Focused Environment
A successful teaching and learning program in an outcomes focused environment integrating technology in Society & Environment would also need to:
- Embed the use of technology in the learning outcomes for students.
- Ensure that the technology improved the teaching and learning program and learning effectiveness.
- Promote innovative and student-centred approaches to learning.
- Develop individual and group learning programs as a consequence of recognising the diversity of students' needs and learning styles.
- Develop a balance of specific focused and open-ended tasks.
- Provide opportunities for integrated learning or cross curricula links.
- Take and enquiry-based and problem solving approach to learning.
- Provide opportunities for students to evaluate and shape technological developments.
- Link activities to a school plan that is focused on student outcomes.
Learning Technologies and the Process Outcome
With regard to the Society & Environment learning outcomes, the new technologies will particularly assist student learning in the Investigation, Communication & Participation outcome (in all four stages - planning, conducting, processing and applying - of the investigation process), through contexts covering all five of the conceptual outcomes.
Society & Environment teachers and students are closely involved in investigations encompassing interviews, surveys and fieldwork research. They design suitable methods for collecting, organising and gathering information and then record this data in a variety of ways using symbols, graphs, maps, diagrams, tables, statistics and models.
The collected information is translated and interpreted into a form suitable for communication to a variety of audiences. As part of this information databases may be created, or reports written. In all of these processes, the new learning technologies are useful and of great importance in bringing this learning area alive.
Many teachers are basing cooperative learning strategies upon Internet access and facilitating group jigsaw approaches. The Internet offers current information on an enormous range of relevant Society & Environment contexts and is an important tool in teaching critical literacy. CD-Roms and databases are commonly utilised as sources of information. Flight simulations over parts of Australia and the local DOLA Panairama CD-ROM package of Western Australian aerial photographs are examples of exciting developments in this area.
Creative use of software is becoming increasingly attractive to Society & Environment classrooms. Consequently a variety of packages for web page editing, survey creation and hypertext presentation, are being used by schools. Digital cameras, with appropriate image manipulation software, have enormously wide-ranging applications in this learning area, and enable classes to capture fieldwork information for later processing and presentation.
Networking, email, video and audio-conferencing via the Internet and the World Wide Web - provide great potential for Society & Environment teaching and learning. Students are able to communicate with other students and access a range of media (e.g. newspapers) in other countries and cultures.
International, interstate and intrastate classroom networking projects require these technologies in order to be effective. The Globe environmental project, Warnbro Senior High School's Environmental Summit linking six continents, and the Western Australian Ribbons of Blue water monitoring program, are examples of projects currently or recently using networking media and linked computers, facilitating sharing of research results by schools.
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