The Analysis

Analysis of Creating a Working Online Radio Company

This project is to create, form and run an Internet based online radio station by developing the necessary skills needed to run it. A further aim of this project is to cater to the needs of the school community by way of providing a series of podcasts for that community.

As a starting point I will refer to Clark (1995) who states that the analysis stage is an assessment of the systematic exploration, of the gap between what the learner knows and what needs to be learnt. Analysis of the `gap? by Daigre, Regina M. et al (2007) has been further defined as to determine the current state of skills, knowledge, and abilities of the learners and to identify the desired or necessary conditions for success. For this analysis it will be further broken down into `whom?, `what? and `when?.

Learner Needs (Whom)
The learners are all aged either 8 or 9 years old. They are all in Grade 3 and twenty out of the twenty-three students in the class are ESL learners. The remaining 3 students are native speakers of English. The students have had weekly computer lessons since Kindergarten and have made a couple of podcasts prior to this project as well as maintained a blog for 5 weeks.
The students reading age has been tested using the Waddington?s Reading Test and the class range is between 7 years to 11 years old. Cultural considerations are that the broadcasts will be in English with special segments in Indonesian. This will reflect the needs of the school community in which the language of instruction can be either English or Indonesian.
There is a school expectation that all learning be Bible based as this is a Christian school, however the teachers must be sensitive to the fact that there is 1 Buddhist, 2 Confucian?s and 4 Moslem students in the class of 23 children. All the students are highly motivated and will be involved in the design and implementation of all learning activities.
Instructional Goals (What)
In the cognitive domain of Blooms Taxonomy the analysis section recommends, ?Material needs to be separated into concepts so that its organizational structure may be understood.?

That rings very true when designing a unit of learning using the International Baccalaureate?s Unit of Inquiry planner. The learning aims are defined as a central idea and further supported by the key concepts. In this case the central idea is ?Effective communities are managed by responsible citizens?. The key concepts are function, form and responsibility.

The IBO (2007) encourages teachers to continually refer to the key concepts when designing learning activities for the students. All learning must support the continued developing understanding of these key concepts within a range of learning activities. The teacher must continually analyze the learning by asking ?Is it worth knowing?? or ?Does it develop enduring understandings??

The key concepts might be deconstructed into the following:

(Form) To learn how to build a company. What workers are needed and what are their job descriptions? To learn how an online radio podcast is made. What are the steps and who is involved?
(Function) To learn how to write a podcast. How to write creatively? How to make it interesting for the audience? How to read using a `radio? voice. To engage an expert, a primary resource to learn radio announcing skills.
(Responsibility) To learn how to cater to the audience?s needs. How do we know if we are successful? How to make the podcasts popular? Are our podcasts accessible for all? How do the different departments work together to produce a podcast?

Learning Outcomes (when)
Checking for understanding needs to be done on a continuous basis. The teacher will use a range of assessment strategies such as checklists, rubrics, anecdotal notes and audience feedback to measure the progress of the learning. At the completion of the unit the students will write a reflection of their learning process. A learning journal will be kept by all students, which will be published on the students? individual blogs. A special blog will be set up to record the process of the learning.


Bibliography
Clark, D 2007, Learning Domains or Bloom's Taxonomy [online], Available from: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html#four [Accessed: 05.04.08].

Clark, D 2006, Big Dog ISD Page [online], Available from: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/sat.html [Accessed: 05.04.08].

Daigre, Regina M. et al. 2007, Instructional analysis: Analyzing the learners. [online], Available from: http://www.angelfire.com/la2/learners/learners.html [Accessed: 05.04.08].

International Baccalaureate Organization 2007, Making the PYP Happen, 2007 edition (copies may be downloaded from the IBO site by member schools only at http://occ.ibo.org/ibis/occ/guest/home.cfm)