Year Level(s): Year 6, 7 and 8

Number of Students: 26

Broad Aim: To explore how ICT can be used to enhance learning and teaching.

Specific Aim: To identify ways in which the use of ICT can help Raise Achievement for Maori, Pacific and other students in low decile schools.

Method: Develop a MYSTERIES intranet site as part of the language/integrated programme with the year six, seven and eight students. Each child will have a page and there will be an index page. Each child's page will have:

- Word art title
- A photo
- Page border
- A question and answer research project based some actual mystery
- Picture(s) associated with their mystery

As an extension some children will add an animation that they have created themselves to their page

Assessment: A comparison will be made between the research work undertaken for the "Personal History project" and that undertaken for the "Mysteries" project. The outcomes will be assessed in terms of:

- Clarity of published work
- Quality and depth of work
- Student motivation to complete the tasks
- The degree to which they get the point of the project.

Learning Areas for Project: Literacy

Essential Skills for Project: Information, Problem Solving

Achievement Level(s): 3,

Specific Learning Outcomes: 1. Make and design layout for a personal intranet webpages.
2. Use the computer as a tool to collect, structure, manipulate, retrieve and communicate information.
3. Information literacy outcome - Independently plan and organize an enquiry based research project about a MYSTERY.

What Went On: The children have been working on learning the skills involved with report writing in class. We decided to use those skills as the base for a homework assignment. The students were asked to choose a mystery to research and present their research in the form of a poster. The homework sheet is included as a supporting file. The children were given the opportunity to use the internet to gather information after school and during lunch times. A large number of our students go to the local library each night after school. The library also has the internet.

After completion of the homework, information gathering side of things, the student then presented their research on the class intranet. Setting up the intranet involved the students in taking digital photos, linking hyperlinks and changing text on hyperlinks. The actual publishing of work involved understanding how to edit the intranet, inserting word art, changing text - font and colour and inserting topical pictures from the digital camera.

What Worked: The most positive aspect of this learning experience was that my students were motivated and became fully involved in the project. They were all keen to work independently on their assignments and volunteered their own time during lunch hours and before and after school to complete their publishing. The students enjoyed bringing their work to life with the graphics and colours and backgrounds available through the intranet. The intranet also gave them the opportunity to extend and experiment with their basic publishing skills. The students were uninhibited to try out new buttons and in the process I learnt a few new functions as well. Another positive aspect of the project is that students who normally have lower quality work through poor presentation and spelling, set and achieved high quality work. This was because spelling could be easily checked and they could include cool graphics.

What To Do Different: We achieved a lot with our limited resources. Our old computers struggled along coping with the tasks we were asking them to do and we managed to complete the whole project without one blowing up! My students spend a lot of time gathering information from the internet that was not utilizing their time effectively. As they develop the skills of looking for key words and critiquing sites, improvements in the quality of their research will be made. An area for improvement would be downloading pictures from the internet to be included in the project. This is new learning for most of my students and we didn't have the time to spend developing the necessary skills. I will definitely use the intranet in the future in a variety of ways, as it is a fantastic tool for enhancing student motivation for learning.

The degree to which students achieved the specific learning outcomes for the action research project: Fully

The degree to which ICT helped students achieve the specific learning outcomes for the action research project: Extremely helpful

Supporting Files: http://www.lea.co.nz/ictpd/Uploads/The Loch Ness monster.doc