Session 1: Gather, organise and identify
Students looked at the artefacts in the classroom and gathered/organised their thoughts using the e‑TASC tool. The teacher used an interactive whiteboard to show students her own e‑TASC project on historical objects.
Students had already logged into the e-TASC tool and opened the ‘Looking at Artefacts’ project. The teacher then showed the artefacts to the students and invited them to consider the stimulus questions. The students typed their responses into ‘Text’ within the Gather/Organise section (How to upload text). Students linked this text to the questions and/or the images of the artefacts. This enabled them to explicitly connect their thoughts, an important part of the TASC process (How to make links between items).
Students found other sites relevant to the artefacts and uploaded these into ‘Links’ within the Gather/Organise section. They also created more questions in ‘Text’ and connected these to particular artefacts.
So far the students have:
- examined the artefacts and thought about the ‘meaning’ (purpose, historical context, features) of each
- recorded all they currently know about the artefacts in the e‑TASC tool
- noted the different techniques used to recover or generate information about the artefacts.
The teacher guided the students to copy images from Gather/Organise into Identify. Each student now had two copies of the images and a fresh screen (Identify) to work in.
Students were asked to identify what further research and creative work they could do relating to the artefacts. The purpose was to get them to focus on a question or problem they needed to find an answer to.
In the final part of the session, students considered what more they would like to learn about the artefacts:
- I want to find out more about the second artefact, what it was used for and who used it.
- I want to find out what the third artefact is, and then make a modern version of it.
- I want to think about how the artefacts would have been advertised.
- I want to find out what connects these artefacts and the tools we now use in the kitchen.
Students recorded these within ‘Text’ in their individual projects and saved them for the next session. The teacher encouraged them to think of more than one idea and to order them using ‘Rate’ (How to rate). Students also made links to the images of the artefacts.