Final COETAIL Project Proposal

For our fifth and final course of the COETAIL program, we need to take everything we learned through the first four courses and apply it to our teaching. As a Technology teacher, the hardest part of this assignment for me is not using technology in my classroom but deciding which class to focus on. My Year 7s are doing a Presentation Zen themed unit. My Year 8s are doing photo manipulation with a range of programs. My Year 9s are creating Scratch animations based on social media and may pair up with students in British Columbia for feedback about their work. All of those would probably be reasonable and respectable choices but I've decided to go with my Year 10 class. Their project is an MYP moderated project which last year was called Relaunch. In last year's incarnation, students were asked to find a product that has lost prominence in the public eye and 'relaunch it' by producing some form of advertisement for it.

As a department, we knew that the unit could be better so this year's edition (still, somewhat awkwardly, titled Relaunch), I tweaked it a bit and gave students the choice of three problems to solve:

1. Using digital technology in an interesting or innovative way, how can you ‘relaunch’ (take something that people are already familiar with and promoting it in a new way by getting people to think about it in a new or different way) a real company or product’s public image with regards to its environmental or social perception?


2. Using digital technology in an interesting or innovative way, how can you promote a real club, service activity or event within the local community?


3. Using digital technology in an interesting or innovative way, how can you teach real people to actually do something they couldn’t do before?

The reason I chose this unit as my focus for my final project lies in the words, "using digital technology in an interesting or innovative way." Unlike many units where the students are pushed towards a particular way of presenting their information, this one is a bit different in that students choose themselves what they will do. So far, students have chosen different types of video, stop motion, creating a website, creating a phone app and one student has chosen to try to create a chat bot type solution. I have some experience with most of these but I've only dabbled in app building and I've never even considered making a chat bot let alone thought about how to do it. I find it exciting that my students are willing to challenge themselves to try new things and push their learning forward rather than falling back on things they're already comfortable with. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with!