Melbourne, Australia

April 18, 2007

Step 6: Work Hard, Play Hard!

The Project:

This was another exciting week for our project. We only have a few more weeks to finalize our framework, so we have been working extra hard to get everything finished so we can start getting feedback from different teachers.

First of all, we wrote the universal design section of our framework. This section details all of the good practices that teachers should follow to best include all of the students in the class. This includes things such as various areas of presentations, such as always using a light background and dark text so there is enough colour contrast to maximize the amount of people that can see it best. Also, making sure that you do not stand in front of a bright light and always face the class to ensure that students can lip read or hear you at all times.

Our matrix has a name!! We now refer to our matrix as SAM: the Student Accessibility Matrix. Catchy, huh? We spent the rest of our time putting together the solutions for the specific disability matrixes for mobility, auditory, and visual impairments. We have set it up to make it the most useful for everyone. We have broken the solutions down into useful categories and we have a bulleted list underneath it for quick access and then a paragraph containing more information underneath that.

We had our friend, Colin, look over our mobility framework to give us some insight to help us make it better and we got a lot of great information from him to help continue to shape and finalize our mobility matrix and solutions. We are going to have some of the teachers of the deaf and blind that we spoke with in the last few weeks to get some feedback about what we can change to make it better.

We are also looking into different ways to distribute our framework to different teachers in Australia and the United States! We applied to present at the National Science Teacher Association conference in Boston next year. My sponsor would fly out from Australia and my team and my professor would present to the teachers about how to best include students with disabilities. We have our fingers crossed that we will be accepted as presenters so that we can spread SAM to as many people as possible!

Footy:

Our sponsor is a HUGE footy fan! So he took us to watch the team he supports, the Richmond Tigers! Footy is Australian Rules Football and it is the greatest game ever!! There were 70,000 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (the MCG) where they play and this was one of the biggest rivalry games of the season and it was a blast! I’m still trying to figure out the rules of the game, but it is such a great game and so much fun to watch! (Google it…it’s worth it!)

Surf’s Up:

A bunch of us headed back down towards Torquay and went a little further on the Great Ocean Road to a town called Anglesea. We got surf boards, wet suits, and headed out to the beach for a surf lesson! Our surf instructor was this Scottish surfer who came down to Aussie to enjoy some prime surfing and he was such a great instructor!! On the beach, he taught us how to get up on our board and then we headed out to the waves and tried to catch some waves and worked on standing up. It was a perfect day to surf and the beach had perfect conditions…gorgeous weather, perfect sized waves, and no current to take you down the beach.

We spent 2 hours nose diving, crashing, and catching some great waves! It was so funny because we would nose dive in the waves and then get up, grab our board, and run straight back to catch another wave! By the end, we had all successfully stood up and surfed on the board!! We had SO much fun! It is one of the most awesome things that I’ve ever done! I loved it!

Things I’ve Learned this so Far:

1. They ask for your John Wrigley instead of your John Hancock.
2. Footy was born in Melbourne, Australia.
3. Surname = last name
4. The fins on beginner surf boards are soft, so that they don’t hurt you when they hit you in the head.
5. “Hold on a tick.” = “Hang on a second.”
6. Footy players cannot get thrown out of a footy game no matter what. Even if they punch another player in the face, they can’t get kicked out of the game, they can only get suspended from future games.
7. “The chef always ruins his first batch of scones.”
8. If a player hits the post in footy, the team gets one point.
9. The rental car company will freak out when you tell them that the car has a full tank of gas; make sure that you tell them you put PETROL in the car!
10. 10. A 180 jump on a surf board is called a switch (and I did a few!).