Sunday, July 29, 2018

Sustainable Development Goals

It is great to attend a conference, workshop or hui and be able to implement what you learn straight away and that was the case with both events that I attended in the recent school holidays.

I was very lucky to attend the face to face MIE Hui weekend in Auckland (two blog post worth a read by Microsoft Education NZ and Sam McNeill). This was an amazing weekend of learning and reconnecting.  I came away with a number of great ideas that I could put into practice on day 1 of term 3.
Prior to the hui  I had come across and completed the  Sustainable Development Goals in the Microsoft Educator Community. At the hui these goals were again mentioned in a skype call with Koen Timmers (Global Teacher prize finalist 2017 & 18) who is an ambassador for the SDGs. He spoke about the SDGs and the work he has been involved in. I was also found very interesting the program he has set up where teachers around the world are teaching refugees in Africa. Project Kakuma is where  over 175+ educators around the world teach Kakuma refugees via Skype.


Back to what is happening in my Year 10 class this term week 1:
This term with my Year 10 Social Studies class we are looking at the Level 5 Achievement Objective: Understand how people’s management of resources impacts on environmental and social sustainability. We are linking this AO to the SDG 13 Climate Action. Students are also working on the skills of maker mindset and thinking. Social Science is connecting with Science for this unit of work.
I developed this Sway using resources from the Microsoft Educator Community. This was to give a context and understanding of what the SDGs are,  where they have come from, as well as what sustability is:




This generated a lot of class discussion around the role of the United Nations and those involved. Questions on what needs to be done to make the world a better place was particularly interesting. Students then created a visual poster or diagram in their books on what they understood sustainability to be eg.


This student was looking at the before and after e.g poverty v wealth
This next student created a diagram to illustrate their understanding:


From here we looked at another Sway about Climate Change:



We spent a lot of time discussing the Greenhouse Effect. Students drew a geographic diagram of the Greenhouse Effect. 

Our next step is look at fossil fuels and renewable resources. Ultimately the students are going to work in Minecraft Edu and combine their knowledge gained in Science (e.g.wind turbines) and Social Studies. I will blog about this in a couple of weeks. The students are very excited about using Minecraft - I've never played in Minecraft. However, there is a good course in the Microsoft Educator Community to get me started. I will definitely be the teina (learner) with Minecraft and the  students will be the tuakana (teacher) (tuakana/teina relationship).

NB: The Sways contain minimal student activities this is because there is a quite a lot  of student choice/input into how we show their understanding based on the discussion and direction the learning takes.