IDU Reflection

In French, we were asked to create a website about the lesson for people who do not know anything about French and the beginners. This is a part of IDU, Interdisciplinary Unit. Interdisciplinary learning is a way for students to learn and also to fulfill student’s needs. The educator will choose interdisciplinary learning for a way to help and deliver the content to students.

For this interdisciplinary unit, we were asked to make a website about the MFL that we are learning which is French for the students in grade 7. Not only for grade 7, but also for beginners and those people who does not know anything about it. In this website, there are many things that you could learn and there are also specific topics like grammar, nouns, articles etc. There also many videos about the French subject that you could watch. By using this website, I am sure that the students could learn about French. It will be really helpful when you go on a holiday to a French country. In this website, there are videos showing how to ask question, make a conversation and also to talk to the local people of French countries.

It was really fun in creating this website since I'm interested in designing things. I didn't think it would be that boring to create a website. It was really interesting to make fun and it doesn't benefit the students only, but also us. We are improving our IT skills in creating a website. The website that I created did not turn out that bad actually. Of course there are few challenges that I encountered while making this website such as I had to create many pages for each topic and all the pages didn't have same design. So I had to keep changing the design for all pages. The other challenge that I encountered was that I lost most of my work once. Once, there was a problem occurred and the screen froze for few minutes. I pressed the button save, but it did not actually save. Then I closed the website and on the next day i checked it, it was all gone. For this website, I don’t think I put lots of pictures and I also did not put lots of games. Because of this, the website might not attract the students because it might not be interesting. If I am making a website again, I would like to add more games that might interest the students and also pictures. In my website, I only add word search puzzles and that might seem boring to the students.

While creating this website, I think I may have learnt something from it. There were few things that I did not learn in my French class, but I learnt it here instead like adverbs in French, reflexive verbs etc. I think it will be very helpful to me as well. In the future, if I ever need to learn French I will just go to the website that I created. 


According to  this website, http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/what-are-the-benefits-interdisciplinary-study, the benefits of learning it are:

• Students are highly motivated as they have a vested interest in pursuing topics that are interesting to them. As a result, the content is often rooted in life experiences, giving an authentic purpose for the learning and connecting it to a real world context. Consequently, the learning becomes meaningful, purposeful and deeper resulting in learning experiences that stay with the student for a lifetime.
• Students cover topics in more depth because they are considering the many and varied perspectives from which a topic can be explored.
• Critical thinking skills are used and developed as students look across disciplinary boundaries to consider other viewpoints and also begin to compare and contrast concepts across subject areas.
• Students begin to consolidate learning by synthesising ideas from many perspectives and consider an alternative way of acquiring knowledge.
• Exploring topics across a range of subject boundaries motivates students to pursue new knowledge in different subject areas.
• Transferable skills of critical thinking, synthesis and research are developed and are applicable to future learning experiences.
• Interdisciplinary knowledge and application of different disciplines can lead to greater creativity.