Authentic Learning and wiki's
May 24, 2012Yesterday in our final tutorial for this unit we got to present and watch everyone’s group wiki presentations.Our group decided to go first and I was really pleased with the outcome of our movie, but after seeing other groups present their work I realised that some of theirs was heaps more engaging. One group that did really well was the girly geeks, I think this is because they chose to stand up and present their work to the class on the day. They chose to do their topic on healthy eating which I thought was a great idea because it’s not only a great authentic task to work with it also install’s really good morals for young minds that they will hopefully grow up with and help the world become a more healthy place. Another group that impressed me was Hakuna Matata, they did their presentation using imovie and used humour and quirkiness which I think achieved a more engaged class and really got everyone’s attention. It was really interesting to see what other groups had come up with, how they worked together, and how they visually chose to present their wiki. Everyone put in a lot of effort and seemed to come up with really different ideas that I think would work great in primary schools. 
Watching the wiki’s brought everything into perspective and showed me how far we had all come since the start when everyone was stressed out and confused about what was needed to be done. I think that authentic learning has been a huge challenge for most of the students in this unit including myself, but in a good way because it has pushed barriers and made us go that step further into our learning. Authentic learning is a perfect way to learn as students becoming future teachers as I suspect there will be many times in my near future that I will be continuing to learn new things and be highly creative on my own without the guidance of a tutor or any sort of support person there to help.
I definitely think I will be using authentic learning in my classrooms no matter what the year group, because as an adult now I wish my teachers had of exposed me to this style of thinking. Now that I have come to an end in this unit I can really look back and reflect on it. I feel that this unit has given something to me that no other learning environment has and that’s the ability to push myself and come up with what I think is a more creative end product. Authentic learning gives students the option to express their own personal creative styles because they are not pushed to do something one way or the high way. I can see now this will greatly benefit all students in being confident with their work and rewarding them massively at the end.
Posted by Rebecca Bowley.