A Constructivist Approach to Designing Curriculum:

This lesson - Voyage of Discovery: An Ideal Day in Toronto - was designed by the Diamond group, students in the course 1602S (Introduction to Computer Applications in Education) in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE, University of Toronto. The objective of our project was to design a lesson using constructivist principles.All communications for the project took place on the Web Knowledge Forum, a conferencing system allowing participants to write and post notes, as well as read, build-on and, given permission, edit other members' notes.

We believe that this project in itself was based on constructivist principles. It was our group's responsibility to learn and to help one another to communicate through a computer conferencing system. We also needed to share our own interests and experiences in order to create an authentic lesson using our resources in most efficient ways.

In designing this lesson, it was our group's responsibility totarget an audience, choose the content of the lesson, design the objectives, the activities, the evaluation tools and criteria and so on... Finally, it was also our responsibility to find a meaningful and authentic way to present this project to our classmates and to the professor.

This lesson follows constructivist principles in many differentways. It has an authentic audience, being anyone who would like to visit Toronto for a day ( or more generally anyone who is looking to plan a trip!) The learner is invited to work with other learners and to learn how to find project resources on the Internet using different search engines. The content and activities of the lesson have real sources with sufficient options for learners to make adaptations of their search or goals, thus making the lesson meaningful and linking it to learners' personal interests.

The evaluation section includes lists of expectations and criteria. It is based on learners' self evaluation as well as peer and teacher input. Finally, learners are invited to present their project to an authentic audience, either other classmates or the entire world (if published on the WWW!)

By the time the learners complete their project and present their work, they will have learned how to use search engines; they will have known more about the city of Toronto; they will have created authentic trip plans that could be used by themselves or others and, most probably, improved their ability to work with others. And this is why we can say that this lesson was constructed using constructivist principles.