LEARNING & TEACHING @ MFGSC

Parent-Teacher-Student Learning Conferences

Tuesday August 25th

Our Term 3 Parent-Teacher-Student Learning Conferences will be held on Tuesday 25th August between 12pm and 7pm on the Main Campus of the College. This is an important College event and an opportunity to discuss your daughter’s learning and progress face to face.

There will be no classes in the morning. However, your daughter is expected to attend the Conference with you. Teachers will be having a short break between 2-2.20pm and a dinner break between 4.25-5pm and you will not be able to make a booking during these times. You can now make a booking using Compass.

BOOKINGS CLOSE: Monday 24th August at midnight

You can make a booking using Compass – go to the Community icon (the two people) and select Parent-Student-Teacher Conferences. Students cannot book interviews using their accounts.

We posted a letter to all parents and carers including a list of our teachers and the rooms they will be in on the day. There is also a handout which explains how to make a booking on Compass, a list of where teachers are located and a map of the Main Campus. These documents are in the School Documentation section on Compass– go to the folder called ‘Parent-Student-Teacher Learning Conferences’.

 Please be mindful that each Learning Conference goes for 10 minutes only. If you would like to arrange a more in-depth discussion with a particular teacher, then please make another appointment with that teacher.

We look forward to seeing you at this event and discussing your daughter’s learning progress, her achievements and her goals. Please contact me at the College on 4243 0500 if you have any questions.

Engineering Students at Work

 When four of our Year 10 students are given a real life project synopsis, a week to generate ideas, design and create a product as well as access to some of the best facilities and minds in Australia, they do amazing things.

 Last week four of our Year 10 students – Lily Cowan-Benz, Isabel Etulain, Hannah Stoel and Ashleigh Borgelt – did some amazing thinking as part of the Engineering at Work program at Deakin’s CADET facility.

 Deakin University's Centre for Advanced Design in Engineering Training (CADET) provides the best future-focused engineering and design facilities in the Australian university sector and offers the most advanced engineering and design training capabilities in regional Australia.

 http://www.deakin.edu.au/engineering/cadet

 Our students were given the following Project Synopsis:

Imagining that they had been engaged by a relief organisation to develop solutions for similar situations, their project was to develop an Emergency Shelter. The emergency shelter would be transported in bulk quantities to emergency affected areas and designed and pre-cut from cardboard.

Mr Collier, Ms Crofts and I visited the girls throughout the week at CADET – they were considered as students of Deakin University throughout the week and worked a 9am-5pm week. What a wonderful experience it was to see them so immersed in such a challenging and thought-provoking project. What I saw on display was a learning task that promoted deep learning and created opportunities for our students to:

-          Generate ideas using strategies they were familiar with and develop a plan

-          Apply their understanding, knowledge and skills from the disciplines of Maths, Science, English, Art, Design, Graphics and Media

-          Collaborate genuinely as a team; react and refer to each other’s ideas; justify their ideas; explore possibilities together

-          Make mistakes and learn from them

-          Use technology in a meaningful and purposeful way to design a product

-          Learn by doing; ask thought-provoking questions as well as for assistance at their ‘point of need’

-          Manage time for themselves

 In the end they created an emergency shelter called the ‘Hexahome’ (including a scaled computer design and a physical prototype/model) and presented a report to an audience of teachers, students and their parents. Well done girls!

 Ashleigh reflected on her week as an engineer at CADET and wrote:

Being a part of CADET, I didn’t expect to discover much more with my abilities than I would have with any school projects. By having a project to design and engineer an ‘Emergency Shelter’ was a great privilege. The ideas from our group, the self-knowledge in materials, as well as daily physics, we discovered how much we can do with engineering by accomplishing a problem in need, including discussing opinions.

We all had fun with the laser cutter, which is very interesting and innovative, including the 3D Virtual Reality room, and that was extraordinary in comparison from a simple computer to a four screen room, that enables you to get a better view of your design.

 I now see how important it is to have schooling, for each subject is relevant to design engineering, whether it is Music to Sports, it will always be a small part of Design Engineering. I hope to see something like this towards our school-learning program, where girls can be a bigger part in Design Engineering and be able to experience something incredibly amazing.   

National Science Week 15th - 23rd August

http://www.scienceweek.net.au/

The schools’ theme for National Science Week 2015 is Making waves – the science of light, based on the International Year of Light.

On 20 December 2013, the UN General Assembly 68th Session proclaimed 2015 as the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies (IYL 2015).

In proclaiming an International Year focusing on the topic of light science and its applications, the UN has recognized the importance of raising global awareness about how light-based technologies promote sustainable development and provide solutions to global challenges in energy, education, agriculture and health. Light plays a vital role in our daily lives and is an imperative cross-cutting discipline of science in the 21st century. It has revolutionized medicine, opened up international communication via the Internet, and continues to be central to linking cultural, economic and political aspects of the global society.

We have extended Science week to include Technology, Engineering and Maths. Our Science, Technology and Maths Learning Areas have combined powers to organise a wonderful week of events and activities during STEM week.

Khan Academy have now created a set of YouTube videos developed around many science concepts https://www.khanacademy.org/science

Colour, Symbol, Image

Our teachers use a range of teaching strategies to encourage their students to identify and distill the ‘essence’ of ideas when they are reading, watching or listening. To encourage our students to use metaphors and more non-verbal ways of demonstrating their understanding and thinking, the ‘Colour, Symbol, Image’ thinking routine allows the learner to represent their thinking in different ways and can be used to enhance their comprehension of what they’re reading, watching or listening or to reflect on previous events or learnings. It also helps to generate discussion of a text as the students share their colours, symbols and images.

Below is Jasmine Steen’s (7L) thinking relating to a chapter in the memoir ‘Chinese Cinderella’.

Damien Toussaint, Assistant Principal, Learning and Teaching