Flow of Activities
Activity Personal use
What information systems do I use?
Australian Curriculum Alignment
What's this about?
The home is a useful context to study information systems for personal purposes.
Entertainment is an area where most families engage with information systems, such as paid subscriptions to music, television and movie content.
Communication with interstate or overseas friends and family may be in the form of video and voice calls using telecommunications application software and is an example of a type of information system.
Also becoming more and more prevalent are the home monitoring of security, home appliance and energy management, as well as monitoring the health of the individuals in the home. Information systems make this type of monitoring possible. Digital systems such as computers, tablets and smartphones are integral to the solutions, with particular software applications required.
Learning tasks
- Explore the way we use information systems for personal purposes, such as for entertainment and communication.
- Use Poll Everywhere or a similar collaboration tool to gather and record information about services, such as if they:
- have paid television access (Foxtel, Netflix etc)
- have paid music access (Spotify, iTunes)
- use an app (Skype or WhatsApp) to talk to friends and family overseas or interstate
- have Google Home
- have access to online books (Amazon)
- use wi-fi to connect to multiple devices
- make use of Xbox Live or PlayStation Live
- watch YouTube
- have access to a smartphone.
- What are all of these used for – what are the purposes of the information systems? Create an affinity map of all the ideas that they have gathered. Students brainstorm ideas around the systems that they use in the house, record these on post- it notes, and then try to categorise them by common themes. They should end up with categories such as entertainment, communication, power conservation, education and security.
- Discuss student experiences of using free, or trial, games and the bought versions, or compare free apps with those purchased or those with in-app purchases.
- Identify the digital system (hardware and software and network), data, processes and people – who uses the system, and for what purpose?
- Students draw a floor diagram of their house showing where all the technology is in the house. They could have it colour-coded depending on whether it is an example of hardware, software or a connection via a network.
Supporting Resources
Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere is a useful collaboration tool.
RoomSketcher
Use an online tool that enables students to sketch their room.
Assessment
Suggested approaches may include
- labelled diagram colour coded with a description of the purpose of each of the systems (eg entertainment, communication, power conservation).
Activity School use
How does a library borrowing system work?
Australian Curriculum Alignment
What's this about?
A database is a computerised system that makes it easy to search, select and store information. Databases are used in many different places.
A computerised school library borrowing system is an example of an information system that uses a database to:
- catalogue resources
- manage the borrowing and returning of books and other resources
- provide reports and statistics on the use of the library collection
- provide integrated access to online and print resources.
Learning tasks
- Use the school or local community library to explore the usefulness of an information system to locate, record and report on reading resources.
- If available, start with the class library of books. Check if the following kind of information, or data, is available on these books: title, author, genre, length, lexile score (reading level), student rating and so on.
- Ask how could we record and store this information? This could be done collaboratively using a Google spreadsheet, for example. Each student takes a book and records data into a shared document. Demonstrate how the complete document can be sorted and filtered to locate a book. Discuss the benefits of such a document, for example, for accessing who has the book, its rating or peer-written review or even a student-developed quiz. The user interface could be an option for further exploration. You may decide there is benefit from the class continuing to maintain this spreadsheet and each student adding their own review score as they read a book, which would allow them to then search by genre and score etc to find books that interest them that their peers enjoyed.
- Discuss students' experiences with borrowing books and other resources from the school library.
- Ask how the librarian knows what books are borrowed, what books they have and how to find a type of book, or a book by a certain author or by topic.
- Ask the librarian to explain and demonstrate how the library resources are catalogued using an information system. Explain that the information is stored and accessed in a database. Discuss the usefulness of the system benefits of a digital system. It may be possible to explain the non-computerised system that used a paper-based manual approach to managing the borrowing of resources.
Supporting Resources
Assessment
Suggested approaches may include
- spreadsheet entry for their class library book, or level of engagement in discussion of school library borrowing system.
Activity Community use
How can information be stored and easily found?
Australian Curriculum Alignment
What's this about?
Organisations such as libraries, large health care professionals and retail stores all use a database to search, select and store information.
When information about an object or person is well structured or organised, it is easier to search for specific details or select particular records.
Learning tasks
- Discuss in simple terms the use of databases such as for health records, the local library, the supermarket and other retail stores.
- Discuss the use of barcodes to identify particular items and why these are important.
- Discuss the need to protect personal information such as at the healthcare professional.
- Create a sample columns and rows they could use to store information about something of interest or that links to the class context, for example:
- Favourite movie, book characters or Superheroes
- Class pet types
- Local backyard animals, Australian animals organised by type, dinosaurs
- Australian capital cities and towns.
- Complete the table of information for each column and row to show how the data is useful the way the data is organised. It is beyond students at this level to create their own digital database.
- A key to successfully organising information into 'bite-sized' pieces is to ask what questions need to be answered. For example, in response to the question 'In our class, what is the most popular day for birthdays, such as 3rd or 27th?' This should prompt students to think about how birthdates are organised so you could search just for the day and not the complete birthdate. In this instance, this would involve separating the day, month and year so you could search just for day.
- Another example could be the most popular first name or street number – students need to understand that you cannot list a full name or street address because you cannot answer the question when the information is structured in this way.
Supporting Resources
Assessment
Suggested approaches may include
- database headings for columns and rows example that includes two or three questions that the structure would allow to generate an answer.
Activity Global virtual tour resources
How can I present information so you feel like you are actually there?
Australian Curriculum Alignment
- Investigating and defining (ACTDIP010)
- Generating and designing (ACTDIP011)
- Evaluating (ACTDIP012)
- Collaborating and managing (ACTDIP013)
What's this about?
A virtual tour is a simulation of an existing location, often made up of a sequence of still images or, in some occasions, video. Sound effects, music, narration and text may also be incorporated. Some virtual tours offer a virtual reality experience when a VR headset such as Google Ccardboard.is worn by the viewer.
Learning tasks
- Students could explore a VR museum identifying the digital system, data, processes and role of people, and then try to create a VR digital solution.
- As part of a study on classifying animals in Science, take a virtual tour of a museum and gather information about dinosaurs and sort them via characteristics.
- Students could create their own pseudo virtual tour of the school using either PowerPoint or Prezi. They could have each slide be a photo of a section of their tour, and then hyperlink arrows to different slides to allow the user to navigate the virtual space.
- Students plan the whole tour in a flow chart before creating the digital solution. They discuss usability and community need, to further ensure that they design a solution that is purpose built.
- Some starting points may be:
- How does a new student find the toilets and other important parts of the school?
- How do I get to the school garden and what might I find there?
- Where are places to play in our school?
- What artworks are on display this term?
- The collaboration aspect of this task involves being explicit about how to plan the task as a group, discuss roles and manage consistency of style and time.
- Note: If undertaking this aspect of the sequence more time will be required than the suggested 5–7 hours.
Supporting Resources
Australian Museum
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History ** Missing thumbnail requires smithsonian thumbnail
Louvre Museum
National Museum of Computing, UK
Natural History
View the Girraffatitan 360 video as well as other multimedia on natural history.
Prezi
A presentation type software for iOS
Virtual Museum Exhibit
A how to of a virtual museum exhibit. Useful background knowledge for the teacher
to see how to set up a presentation.
Assessment
Suggested approaches may include
- Design and implementation of a virtual tour.