Design Analysis Practice on the Class Blog

 I am wanting to use the class blog so the students can analyse each others design work and they can give feedback to each other. 

To get them comfortable with using the class blog for their work we have been uploading their work with description and explanations of what they have been doing - blog post here and blog post here

Next, we had a go at product analysis with structured questions - blog post here

This week we has our first go at analysing drawn designs for the seating project we are doing. I always do the work alongside the students as examples for them to understand what we are working on, so I used my design page for this first go at analysing designs so they felt ok about saying what they thought about it.

I put up my design page, with number on each design so they could decide which one they wanted to analyse. I also  gave them a list of questions that they had to answer in the comment section of the blog post. I have colour coded the questions here to show how i use SOLO Taxonomy to structure the questions to have an increasing level of thought and depth.

1. Which number design are you going to be analysing?
2. Which architect do you think this design was based on?
3. Which part of the design links to the architect’s design elements the most?
4. Do you think this design is suitable for the place that it is designed for? if yes, say why you think it is, and if no, say why you don’t think it is.
5. How would you improve this design?  – you are not allowed to say you wouldn’t change it as everything can be improved.

The students coped really well with their first try at this and their answers were showing analytical thinking and knowledge of the work we have been doing with the designer research.

Link to blog post - scroll down to see the students comments.

Literacy Exercise and Practice with Year 11

 The department has been working with Marc Milford, out literacy expert, for a while now and we have all been making literacy posters for our classrooms so we are presenting a similar approach across the department.

Hinerau wrote a blog post about  the department process here

My original blog post when I worked with Marc on the poster for DVC

Here is my version of the Explanation Poster fro DVC - this went through moderation with Marc so all the posters in the department were showing the same things and skills.

I had printed off copies of the NZQA exemplars and the students had looked at them and seen the difference between N, A, M and E. It is not only the quality of the drawings but the depth of the written analysis as well.

This is also where I got the example to put on my Explanation Poster.

After reminding them today of what we had looked at on these exemplars I gave them out a small copy of the poster on the wall and we read through it and picked out the noun groups and why they were noun groups.

They then had to read through the blank example that I had put together for them and colour in the noun groups that they could find.

We did this as a group and called out the ones we found so we could all share and colour in together.

We then looked for modals / opinions and coloured them a different colour.

Then we looked for the verbs.

The class had a really good try at this today and worked well together.

The next activity is to read information given about materials and write a paragraph about a given picture of a chair.

We did not get really into this today but we sat around together and did a description of the chair before we did any of the reading.

We will then compare the next description they do when they have done their reading about materials and when they use the skills we practiced today.

This is all on the class site here.