Today’s period 4 was the first chance for ages for 8V2 to get into a computer lab and they really enjoyed it. They opened up the main page of the unit and completed the Mumtaz capital letters and commas exercise. A few asked me what to do after that but most realised it was all there for them to choose. The only big problem, which was no surprise, was that once again Discover would not open.

I was thrilled that a couple of the students signed the guestbook, expressing positive responses. Even though it was period 4 and quite hot, everyone was involved. At one point, I noticed myself walking around, observing, without anyone at all calling for my attention. That felt different!

I had taken the basket of books to M19 and a couple of people were scanning in pics from those, but I encouraged people to save from the web and showed a lot of them how to search in Google images. They knew how to file the .jpg documents.

Jessica K and Emma A were very keen to make a webpage on Indian food, which they started in Frontpage. Emma had used it in Published Writing. (Must tell Jenny about the flow-on effect.)

Most people started PowerPoints. I was amazed how quickly they got into them as majority had only done one before. Emma H and Taliah R found a few very good graphics for Transport in India and Cate P and Erin J settled on Mt Everest as their topic.

I have set up a distribution list for each class so will contact people via that with some encouraging comments as we don’t have English again for a whole week now. I will update the calendar and direct students to that and remind them to check back on Info. Process steps in their books. I am really motivated to try to put stuff for special needs on as a high priority and a Christmas unit for Grade 7. Just in closing, I feel very positive about having set this unit up online.

Looking Back/Beginning Again:
Professional Journal -22 August 2002

I have given much thought, time and energy to the creation of this collection of learning activities on India and, although I recognise that it may not meet the needs of all my site visitors, colleagues or even my students, trying to make it do so has been a fascinating and satisfying exercise for me.

The project has engaged and challenged me and has been a source of pride and interest for me and my family, even at times during the past year when I was not consciously focusing on it, for I never knew when into our e-mail Inbox would come a message or suggestion or question from a visitor to one of the pages on my Sunitra's India website.

This website was seeded by my involvement with the Asia Education Foundation. In July 2001, I was awarded a Teacher In-Country Fellowship to Asia and accepted responsibility for developing curriculum about India which would benefit my own students, other students at my school and other teachers and students in the Access Asia program.

Being a very enthusiastic internet surfer and webauthor, I decided to make my unit of work for the worldwide web. I have spent most of my twenty-something years as a teacher in regional Australia and I know from experience the delight of finding rich, fresh learning resources which are flexible, self-explanatory and ready to go. Thus, besides writing for the audience identified by the Asia Education Foundation guidelines, I also wanted to write for the isolated teachers, students in need of extension and those pressed for time. As the reviewer of A Perfect Ganesh says on my Ganesh page, "Westerners are drawn to the Indian myth like bugs to a light" and I felt confident the individual activities would be useful to teachers and of interest to students, even if a few asked me "Is this English?"

On my trip to India, when all the participants got together to discuss our ideas for curriculum development, I got the impression that I may have misunderstood the level of commitment required in return for the fellowship, and made too much work for myself, tiring myself out before I went away. I may have misjudged the expectations, but it was my belief that we were required to create and trial our draft units before we undertook the study tour, then reflect upon them and develop them in the light of our in-country experiences and new contacts. Whether I did it out of a sense of duty or an instinctive wish to minimise any extra stress during the trip caused by not having a sense of direction, that's how my unit evolved.

In late Term 2 of 2001, it so happened that a final-year pre-service teacher was appointed to work with some of my students, so, freed from my usual marking load, I turned my attention to researching India and planning a rich and wide-ranging learning task. After my intern left, I spent much of the September school vacation at the computer, planning, uploading, testing and fine-tuning the learning activities and their technical display at http://www.oocities.org/sunitra_in/ . Then the holidays ended and the innovative self-paced online unit I had only been dreaming about up until then suddenly had to work for sixty curious, demanding students, whether or not computers were available.

My school's Teacher-Librarian, Lorene Furmage, was a tremendous support. She gathered all our school's fiction, non-fiction and audio-visual resources on India and from these I selected the most suitable items for my trusty India trolley, which I trundled to most classes during the Reading phase of the first trial of this unit.

I also borrowed all the books on India or about India or by Indian authors I could get hold of through Inter-Library Loan from other State Library branches in Tasmania and encouraged the students to find their own materials. We advertised what we were doing in the school's weekly bulletin for parents and we hired an Indian Treasure Chest from a local voluntary service group called TasDEC Global Learning Community, so the internet was by no means our only means of research. Nor was it our only means of recording what we had learnt, discussing, observing the work of others or asking questions.

Although I am a keen computer user personally, and the use of technology is one of ten compulsory assessment criteria for all my English students, I am never timetabled into a room which has more than one computer. General English teachers like me must take their turns to see when one of the computer labs is free. I therefore had to plan webpages that were interactive when accessed live but still made sense as printouts. The pages Proverbs, Ganesh and Dashrath are examples. Feedback from several users criticised me for making the fontsize on these pages too small. I realised then that I had sub-consciously minimised the print size to fit the activity neatly onto a one-page printout.

I am a frequent user of the forums section of the Discover website hosted by my employer, the Education Department of Tasmania. So, rather than set up my own Bulletin Board at Geocities to facilitate sharing of ideas and public celebration of learning, I linked to the UBB Student Forum at Discover, where I had created a "sister site" for Sunitra's India, called "Access Asia - India". This site is somewhat unreliable when accessed by 30 users at a time, however, so as a backup I also registered at GSN, Global School Network, a US-based site with which I am less familiar, but which offered a fall-back option for students to discuss, ask questions, upload work to the web or publish book reviews if Discover was slow or not working. The downside of this decision was that all the work on Discover did not show up in my Search This Site results, but our presence on Discover had a built-in collaboration structure and support system, which I value.

Maybe I could have gone it alone, given that an unsupported version of the UBB technology is downloadable free from the website of its creators, but I didn't want to be that much of a smartypants. Since my employers had had the vision and confidence to set up and host such a site designed for collaboration and support of those incorporating the information and communication techologies into their classroom practice, I wanted to thank them by using it. I wish more teachers did, because I fear we might lose it. Come on all you Tassie teachers, help make us the Intelligent Island!

The first activity of the unit asks students "What do you already know about India?" The next follows that with "What do you want to learn about India?" As an English teacher, I wanted to focus the learning to core English skills and knowledge. Of course, if I ask the students for topics that interest them, they come up with many which range more widely than what's on the English syllabus. It then becomes a matter of negotiating them back to our assessment criteria. The key questions of the unit (see Outline) help me do this.

The whole thrust of my unit is to widen and deepen my students' knowledge about and appreciation of the values, beliefs and cultures of India (in Tasmanian English jargon, criterion 7). That's what I care about most. But I have all sorts of activities, from simple spelling and punctuation fill-in-the-gaps (Mumtaz) through comprehension exercises (Hindustan, Ganesh, Dashrath) to book reviews and the more wide-ranging discussions on Discover. One of the most successful non-computer lessons last year was the One-Minute Book Reviews - in practice, more like two, so 30 reviews fitted nicely into a 75 minute lesson.

My first delivery of the unit took about nine weeks. My aim in the second delivery is to streamline this, to make a shorter and purer unit. Since last year, I have added links to a lot more grammar and vocab exercises on Indian issues and I need to back up all the best information stored on the Discover pages, both to protect all my efforts there and to make the data searchable.

Since I have been to India, I am no longer able to be idealistic about romantic notions of Indian culture. Besides reading Indian novels, poems and short stories, I have now been overwhelmed by Indian beggars, been hassled by Indian hawkers, frustrated by Indian bureaucracy and touched by Indian spirituality. I will now be able to guide the students better to appropriate background music so we don't mix up the dignified call to prayer for the Moslems with the frantic activity of the Hindu temple. One of my friends said, the longer you stay in India, the less confident you are to speak about it. Seven months have passed since our return, so I hope that will have been enough time to put all my stressful experiences away from home into context. I want the students to be respectful, compassionate and humble as they learn about India.

I have decided to begin the unit with a showing of Attenborough's Gandhi, so we have a strong shared experience before we embark on our learning quest. Though I seem to have spent a disproportionate amount of time preparing this particular unit, in the knowledge that it is being scrutinised by my colleagues, it will be good to be thoroughly organised as tiredness sets in towards the end of the year.

I originally had as one aim to find a class or some classes of students in India who would be as interested in discussing Australian culture with our students as we were in exploring Indian culture, but that was not to be. For all the wonderful ICT achievements of Indian corporations like the one we visited, Infosys, I found it very difficult, in my limited time there, to find Indian schools with as ready access to the internet as we have in Australia. No doubt there is virtue anyway in keeping it a simpler one-way learning process.

Thanks are due to all those colleagues on the various lists I belong to and those who have seen and responded to my calls for criticisms in guestbooks about the place. Through their feedback, I hope I have made a better and clearer learning experience for all those who use Sunitra's India.

Ref: Mary Louise Holly, Professional Development Through Learning Journals

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