Steph's+Journal+Entries

The texts that are written in red shows my learning.

 * __//﻿﻿Please click here to take our NEW survey. :) -- //__** [| ]

Today my class spent the double lesson creating our wikispace accounts and getting a start on the research project. After I created my account I explored the website to teach myself how to use the different tools wikispace has; like the discussion board and how to create my own wikipage. After that we were told that we have to do the research project in a group of 4. Sara Chan, Hien Pham and Nhi Nguyen are in my group. I believe my group is good because we have 3 different types of learners: innovative, analytic and a common sense learner; plus we all get a long very well. We spent the whole lesson choosing our topic. We all thought that we had to do the same topic if we were in the same group, but at the end of the double lesson we were told that we had to all have our own individual topic to work on. We were all frustrated when we found out that we all had to do our own topic because we realised we just spent the whole double lesson choosing a topic we were all interested in, for nothing. No body in my group ended up choosing a topic, although some of us had some ideas. I didn't have any ideas at all of what I wanted to research on but I'm going to try and think of something and hopefully I'll be able to decide soon.
 * __//Term 1, Week 1 Wednesday Lessons 5 & 6 [02/02/11]//__**

After all the Integrated Learning lessons I had last week, I still haven't decided what I want to do my research on. I spent most of my weekend thinking about what I'm interested in and what topics would be suitable to research for this subject because part of our assessment is whether our information sources are credible or not and it might be hard to obtain credible sources for some topics. For example, if I wanted to do my research project on the Egyptian Revolution. That topic is very recent and there probably won't be many credible sources. After a lot of time spent on thinking about suitable research topics, I came up with 3 ideas. They were 'How to get a job as a Mythbuster", " How games and the internet are affecting students' learning and education" and "What do students and teachers really think of the new SACE with the PLP and the Research Project." I finally decided to do the "How games and the internet are affecting student's learning and education" because I figured that would be the best topic to obtain primary sources from. Even after I chose my topic, I was still uncertain about the way my teacher told me to do things. I was pretty sure we were supposed to be in a group and work on the same topic together because that was what I was told the year before starting the research project and I was also confused about part of the assessment for the research project if we were working on individual topics. How was I supposed to get marked for group work and collaboration if my group wasn't working on the same topic. So I spent the Monday lesson looking all over the SACE website for information on if we were supposed to be working on the same topic. The lesson was over before I could find any information on it.
 * //__Term 1, Week 2 Monday Lesson 1 [07/02/11]__//**

At the start of the lesson, the teacher explained to us that he made a critical mistake. He found out that the research project was actually done with groups doing the same topic that they chose themselves. I was annoyed that we had to start __//**ALL**//__ over again. I spent the first lesson writing a journal and then for the second lesson I got together with Hien, Nhi and Sara and we talked AGAIN about what topic we wanted to research. We decided to pick between the 4 topics we were already going to do individually. The topics were about the Amazon forest, Social networking, how games are affecting students learning and education or about the Cambodian Revolution. Everyone agreed to the Cambodian Revolution as a topic because Sara was //very// interested and enthusiastic about it and Hien, Nhi and myself don't really know anything about the Cambodian Revolution but we're interested in it and will enjoy learning about it.
 * //__Term 1, Week 2 Wednesday Lesson 5 & 6 [09/02/11]__//**

It has taken my group about 3 to 4 lessons to choose our main focus question. We still haven't decided on one but we have thought of a few. They are: '//What were the events that occurred during Pol Pot's reign over Cambodia and what were the motives behind his actions?', 'How did the revolution following Pol Pot's rise to dictatorship over Cambodia unfold?',// and //'Why did Pol Pot wish to create a purely Cambodian nation with out foreign interference?'.// We are leaning towards doing the //'How did the revolution following Pol Pot's rise to dictatorship over Cambodia unfold?'// guiding question because it is the best one that suits what we want to actually find out about the Camboidan revolution. The things we particularly wanted to find out about the Cambodian revolution is how did Pol Pot gain dictatorship over Cambodia, what happened during the time of his dictatorship and how did his actions effect the lives and the way Cambodian live today.
 * //__Term 1, Week 3 Wednesday Lesson 5 & 6 [16/02/11]__//**

Our teacher, Mr. Stav, suggested to us today that we try and link the events of the Cambodian revolution or history in general to the modern society we have in the present day. We took that piece of advice into consideration and tried to brainstorm some questions that linked our topic to us and the modern society and how it affects the present day.

__The questions we came up with were:__ //How is history relevent to us as people of a modern society?// //What is the importance of understanding historical events?// //Why must we record history as accurately as possible?// //Why must history be an important part of lives?// //Why is it important to save history for future records?//

We decided to make the linking question our main focus question and then use our other questions about the Cambodian revolution as our guiding questions to answer the focus question. Sara wanted to do the 'How' question, Hien wanted to do the 'Why' question and Nhi wanted to do the 'What' question. I didn't really mind which question we chose to do but after hearing 5 mintues of Sara, Hien and Nhi's indecisiveness, I decided to just jump in, and decide for them! I decided to choose the //'How is history relevant to us as people of a modern society?'// question because seeing how we have to find a way to link everything back to ourselves, having a question that actually asks how the topic is relevant to us is a good thing.

__//**Term 1, Week 3 Friday Lesson 3 [18/02/11]**//__ Today I was introduced to a website called 'Surveymonkey'. We were asked to compose a survey about our topic. We spent the whole lesson brainstorming different questions. We had some trouble thinking of some so we decided to open up microsoft office to write down ideas of what kind of information we wanted to obtain from conducting the survey. Our focus question is 'How is history relevant to us as people of a modern society?' so we came up with these things we wanted to gain from the survey. From these ideas we thought of 6 questions to ask in our survey that would be the most effective to answering the above questions and our overall focus question. The questions we have in our survey are: We finished composing our survey on the 'Surveymonkey' site by the end of the lesson. Here is a link to the survey: [] I'm enjoying conducting surveys because I'm an analytical learner and I like analysing data for information.
 * //How many people are interested in history?//
 * //How many people understand the significance of history?//
 * //How many people value history?//
 * //How does history impact on their lives? -- [Does it impact on them at all?]//
 * 1) //How old are you?//
 * 2) //Do you like history?//
 * 3) //How important is history in your life?//
 * 4) //Do you understand the significance of history?//
 * 5) //Do you value history?//
 * 6) //Has any historical event impacted on your life?//

During the lesson we decided to make concept maps to help us sort out our ideas. We went on to a website called "Webspiration" which is an online visual thinking tool and can be accessed on <[]>. "Webspiration" is a really easy and fun tool to use. I would use it to make concept maps again if I need them in the future. We made two concept maps; one for which resources to obtain information from for our different areas of the research project; and one for our focus, guiding and sub questions. This is the concept map for resources we composed during the lesson. We also started to make a concept map for our guiding questions but we haven't finished it yet. When there was 20 minutes left of the lesson, Sara, Hien and I decided to go to the school library while Nhi kept working on the concept map. We tried to find some books on the Cambodian Revolution or Pol Pot but didn't have much luck. We only found 3 books but they only have about 2 - 3 pages of information in them. We plan to go to the State Library in the city later to gather more books and other resources we can find.
 * //__Term 1, Week 4 Wednesday__//** **//__Lesson 1 [21/02/11]__//**

**//__Term 1,Week 5 Monday Lesson 1 [28/02/11]__//** On the weekend before week 5, the group started looking for information on the Cambodian revolution and Pol Pot on the internet at home. When we came into the lesson on Monday we started sharing all the information we've gathered. We started to analyse the information we've obtained and decided as a group what information we needed to keep and which ones we're not as important or relevant and filtered them out. Nhi was confused about how our guiding questions were related to our focus question. Sara, Hien and myself had to explain to Nhi that our guiding questions aren't directly connected to our focus question and that we are going to use the guiding questions to help us gather information on the Camboian Revolution as evidence to answer our focus question. She was back on track after a while. We decided to run our ideas for the research project through Mr. Stav to get his opinion on whether it's a suitable topic to research. He said it was a good research topic and suggested some things to help us like ways of comparing information to prove that it's correct and accurate. By the end of the lesson we all agreed on our //purpose// for this research project which is: //to research the Cambodian Revolution and use this is as evidence to answer our focus question.//

**//__Term 1, Week 5 Tuesday Lesson 3 [1/03/11]__//** We had a relief teacher today. He went around the room and asked all the groups what they were doing their research on. When he came to our group we told him that our focus question was //'How is history relevant to us as people of a modern society?'.// He started suggesting all kinds of different things and that threw all of us off track again. We started questioning ourselves about our focus question and we kept thinking that it was too broad and that only researching on one revolution out of all of history would be insufficient evidence to answer our focus question. So we spent the whole lesson discussing about how to change or rephrase our focus question. We came up with '//How did the Cambodian Revolution impact on Australia?'// but then we realised we would be altering our topic altogether and would mostly be researching on Australian history when we want to actually research the Cambodian Revolution in depth, so we scratched that idea and kept discussing. The lesson ended before we came up with a sufficient question so we decided to go home and think about it and return on friday's lesson to discuss it further.

__//**Term 1, Week 5 Friday Lesson 3 [4/03/11]**//__ We spent the whole lesson discussing our focus question again. We know that we want to develop a hypothesis about our opinion and research to get evidence to justify our research but we're having trouble phrasing our focus question to suit our needs. We came up with multipule focus questions through out the lesson but we ended up not using any of them because we always found a flaw in them. These questions were:
 * //How is a historical event relevant to us as people of the modern society?//
 * //How does a revoluation impact on us as people of the modern society? --// We thought it was perfect but then questioned if researching one revolution was sufficient enough. It would be more "accurate" if we researched more revolutions and compared them or just researched revolutions in general. Discussed if we do 'revolution' we would need to revise our whole project because we think the Khmer Rouge would be too insufficient. For a revolution, it would be better to research in general, but then we realised the revolutions have different backgrounds and researching on all the revolutions would take too much time and be too difficult for the time being. E.g. Cambodian revolution -- change of government, French revolution -- liberty and equality.

We haven't came up with a new focus question that we were all satisfied with yet. So we planned to go to Sara's house on the weekend to further discuss our focus question and to try and finalise our question. We are already 5 weeks behind!

I realised that we are going around in circles a lot in our group. I think my group is very analytical and we have to go through everything thoroughly in our heads before we do anything and we always end up finding a tiny flaw in our plans and think we have to change the question again. We are a bit counter-productive and beginning to think we really need a dynamic learner now but I know we'll get there eventually and produce an amazing final product! =D

__//**Term 1, Week 5 Saturday [5/03/11]**//__ Nhi and I arrived at Sara's house at 1:40pm. We started discussing our research straight away because we really wanted to find our perfect focus question to actually make a start on the project. We talked for 2 hours about what to include in our question to lead us to research about the Cambodian Revolution in depth and using that as evidence in any way to link to the modern society. We started to fill in the research project scaffold with the ideas we were coming up with but by 3:30pm we made a little bit of progress but we still haven't come up with a satisfactory question. We came up with a few questions but, like usual, our analytical minds take over and start to think things through thoroughly and we end up finding flaws in the question about how it relates to our purpose and what we would have to research to answer the question. The questions that we came up with were: We realised again that we weren't getting far by talking so we decided to take action and go to the Hindmarsh and State library to find books about the Cambodian Revolution and Pol Pot's regime to get more of an idea of what we're looking at, possibly come up with our focus question and to look at what kind of information was available to us. We went to the Hindmarsh Library first. The library is quite small so we only found 1 book in that library that related to our topic and there's not much information on there either but we decided to borrow it anyway; just in case. After Hindmarsh we went to the State Library. We really loved the State Library because we found every single book we had on our list of "suggested books to research". Plus we found a whole bunch of other books that we believe would be useful as well. It was like a 'gold mine' for us because we felt like we struck gold when we found so many good books relating to our topic at the State Library. We were disappointed when we found out we weren't allowed to borrow books out of the State Library because it is only a reference library. So we are planning to go to the library often and stay there for a while to use the books and have a research/study session to gather and put together information. The library closes at 5pm so we had to leave. Finding and skimming through all of those books were a very helpful experience for us because while looking through the books we realised that the Cambodian Revolution actually spanned through 3 government changes: the French colonisation; the Khmer Rouge Revolution; and the Vietnamese government. We actually only wanted to research the Khmer Rouge Revolution and Pol Pot. So now we know that when we talk about the Cambodian Revolution we actually mean the Khmer Rouge Revolution; one in three parts of the Cambodian Revolution. When Nhi and I left Sara's house we haven't come up with the question yet but we're hoping to get it by Monday.
 * To use the Cambodian Revolution as an example to answer how revolutions impact on us as people of a modern society. The flaw was that the Cambodian Revolution was insufficient for evidence because we thought we would have to research on more than one revolution if we were to do this question.
 * How did the Cambodian Revolution impact on us as people of a modern society? The flaw was that the Cambodian Revolution didn't impact on all of us so we thought it would be hard to relate the Cambodian Revolution to everyone.
 * How did the Cambodian revolution contribute to our current Australian society? The flaw was that if we did this question then we would be mainly focusing on Australian history and not on the Cambodian Revolution as much and we didn't want that because when we started this research project we wanted to research mainly on what happened in Cambodia during Pol Pot's regime.

When our group met up together again today Sara and Nhi told Hien and I that when Nhi and I left Sara's house on Saturday, Sara kept thinking about ways we can phrase our focus question by herself and finally came up with a focus question we would be happy with. Our focus question is now "  //How does knowing about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge revolution contribute to our understanding of a proper government in the modern society?". // We all really liked this question because it phrases our question in such a way that we could research in depth on the Khmer Rouge Revolution and at the same time link it to modern society. Our group likes getting approval from teachers before we start projects, it is a learning habit that I have, so we asked Mr. Stav to look at our focus question again for his approval. He said that our question is very in depth and might be a challenge for us to answer. This made us worried that we might be in way over our heads but we decided to stick with it because it took us a lot of effort to get up to this point and we already know how we are going to go about answering this question in our heads so it shouldn't be too challenging for us.
 * //__Term 1, Week 6 Monday Lesson 1 [7/03/11]__//**

//__**Term 1, Week 6 Tuesday Lesson 3 [8/03/11]**__// I came into the lesson thinking for once that we all knew what we were going to do and that we were on track. But then our focus question hit yet another obstacle. Nhi and Sara started talking about how there is no such thing as a 'proper' government. Hien and I agreed. There is no such thing as a 'proper' government because we have so many different kinds of governments that run differently but are still successful. So we changed our focus question to " //How does knowing about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge Revolution contribute to our understanding of the __qualities__ of a proper government in the modern society?" //  Ms. Miller was our teacher for today and she agreed with us that there really aren't such things as a 'proper' government. She suggested that we take the word 'proper' out of our question completely. We agreed with her and replaced the word 'proper' with the word 'successful' because this would suit our question better. So now our focus question is " //How does knowing about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge Revolution contribute to our understanding of the __qualities__ of a successful government in the modern society? //  We were happy with our question now so we spent the rest of the lesson doing journal entries.

__//**Term 1, Week 6 Wednesday Lesson 5 [09/03/11]**//__ I didn't practise book referencing in the first few weeks into the integrated learning subject, so I practised it today. These are the results of what I did.

After that, my group got together and made a resources concept map for our research on the Australian Government.

We also changed our resources concept map for the Khmer Rouge revolution because we changed a few of our guiding questions due to our change in focus question and we also added a few things.

__**//Term 1, Week 6 Friday Lesson 3 [11/03/11]//**__ During this lesson Mr. Stav told us that he has uploaded our current grades for integrated learning so far. I found out that I was on a B for application, D for investigation, A for collaboration and communication and a B for my reflection. I was surprised when I got a D for investigation because I did some investigation already and I was sure I would be on at least a C grade. I asked Mr. Stave about this and he said that he knows that I've done it but I haven't uploaded any of it on my wiki page where he is actually assessing me from so he had to give me a D because he couldn't find any evidence of my investigation on my wiki page. I learnt that now I'll have to upload everything I do straight after I finish it because it won't get marked if I don't.

I also learnt about the 4 out of the 5 capabilities that is being assessed in the research project. They were communication, personal development, work and learning.

Mr. Stav told us to upload an assessment rubric on the Performance Standards for Stage 1 Integrated Learning so we can refer to it while we're doing our research project.

After that my group gathered together and started to make a 'jobs' concept map to help us distribute the jobs we have to do between us. [This concept map is in the Monday 14th of March session.] The lesson ended before we finished so we planned to go to Sara's house on Monday the public holiday to finish our concept map and watch some documentaries on the Khmer Rouge revolution Sara's Khmer teacher is giving her.

__//**Term 1, Week 7 Monday -- Sara's house [14/03/11]**//__ During this session Sara, Nhi, Hien and I finished more work than we planned which was really nice. We finished our 'jobs' concept map, the 2 extra surveys we had to compose because of our change in focus question, composed questions for the interviews we're going to conduct and we wrote a lot into our research project scaffold. Our concept map, research project scaffold, interview questions and links to our surveys are below.

Research Project Scaffold: Last updated on Wednesday 6th of April 2011]

= Our surveys: Khmer Rouge Revolution Survey --> <[]> = = Australian Government Survey --> <[]> = = [Changed Khmer Rouge Survey and deleted Australian Government survey on Tuesday 22nd of March 2011] =
 * New Khmer Rouge Revolution Survey --> [| ] **



After we completed these things we started watching some documentaries of the Khmer Rouge Revolution that Sara got from her Khmer school teacher. There were 3 documentaries but we could only watch one of them because one of the other documentaries were spoken in French so we couldn't understand anything they were saying and the other one had horrible audio so we also couldn't understand what they were saying. The one documentary we could understand and watch was very useful. It was an investigative documentary called "Return to the Killing Fields". I learnt a lot from this documentary. It had good background information and it also had information from good primary resources. Now that I know the background information about the Khmer Rouge Revolution, I have a better understanding of what I'm researching about and more ideas of how it relates to our focus question. Here is a snippet of the start of the documentary we watched: media type="youtube" key="sRpGJ2pPjIM" height="390" width="480"

__//**For the rest of Term 1, Week 7 [15/03/11 - 18/03/11]**//__ The rest of the week was just spent on updating my journal using the assessment rubric. There was a black out at school on Friday so the computers were unusable. The class spent the lesson talking about presentation skills. I took all that we talked about on board and thought about my weaknesses when it comes to presenting in front of people and what I could do to improve this. We talked about posture, confidence, body language, volume of speech and lots more. I know I get really nervous when I present so my voice is always soft and my posture isn't that great either. I'm going to focus when it comes to presenting to try and project my voice louder and stand up straight.

__//**Term 1, Week 8 Tuesday Lesson 3 [22/03/11]**//__ I spent this lesson updating my journal. Hien Lam, a friend of mine, was in the computer room during the lesson. My group asked him to take our survey and he gave us some really good feedback. He said our survey is not really that good because in our survey our third question is "//Do you know about the Khmer Rouge or Pol Pot's regime?// //If no, thank you for your contribution. Please, press 'done' at the end of the survey. If yes, please continue"//__//**.**//__ This isn't a good question because we're asking people to skip the rest of our survey if they don't know anything about the topic. Hien suggested that we change this and actually provide people with a brief introduction for a question if necessary so people can contemplate the situations themselves and give an opinion on it. This way we'll obtain the most accurate results possible. We went on to monkey survey and changed our survey immediately. I really liked Hien's idea because this would really improve our results; this problem in our survey wouldn't have ever occured to me if it wasn't for Hien. From this new technique that I've learnt from Hien, hopefully I will be able to conduct even more useful surveys for future learning.

__//**Term 1, Week 8 Wednesday Lesson 5&6 [23/03/11]**//__ Today Mr. Stav taught us how to use "Advanced Search" on google. I've never noticed the advanced search option on google before. It's probably because when ever I use google I already know what I'm searching for so I don't need advanced search. But for the research project I need to get my information from good sources like .edu, .gov and .org sites. Advanced search on google is a useful tool to help me filter out all the .com and other unwanted websites that aren't as reliable for legit information. I used this new source finding technique to use straight away and found lots of '.edu' websites to gather information from. Some examples are: After Mr. Stav finished teaching everyone this new technique. My group asked him to look at our research scaffold. He noticed that we didn't have a hypothesis and suggested that we come up with one. We didn't know that we needed a hypothesis because we remembered being told having a hypothesis was optional and we were already happy with our focus question so we decided not to come up with a hypothesis and to actually use our focus question as the hypothesis. Mr. Stav said 'successful government' could mean several different things if you look at it at different perspectives. He thought 'a successful government' in our focus question was a government that achieves their goals but we believe a successful government is one that cares and take into consideration what the people want. After being told that a hypothesis was essential in our scaffold we went about formulating a hypothesis after Mr. Stav suggested we make one so we can actually either approve or disprove our focus question/hypothesis and use it as a way to conclude our final presentation. Mr. Stav helped us deconstruct our focus question to try and come up with a hypothesis. By the end of the lesson the hypothesis we thought of was "Attrocities such as the ones by the Khmer Revolution will never occur in Australia" but we all thought this hypothesis was not right for us because we didn't want to research the Australian government in depth. We were still confused and stuck on how to formulate a hypothesis for our focus question, so we decided to make an appointment with Ms. Woud, the research project coordinator, to help us come up with a hypothesis that is right for us.
 * http://www.csuchico.edu/~cheinz/syllabi/asst001/fall98/billfrench/first.htm
 * http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/cambodia0.htm
 * http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/IHRLC/Leaders_of_the_Khmer_Rouge.pdf

Sara and I went to Ms. Woud's office to ask her about our hypothesis. Before we asked for help on our hypothesis, Ms. Woud told us that our group has to becareful when we interview people because of ethnic boundaries and we might accidentally bring up post-war trauma from bad experiences again. Of course my group already knew about this and we were going to be sensitive about it but Ms. Woud told us to not conduct any interviews at all, just to stay on the safe side. She suggested our group to obtain our information from primary sources like case studies instead of interviews. After this talk we got down to business. Ms. Woud looked at our focus question " //How does knowing about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge Revolution contribute to our understanding of the __qualities__ of a successful government in the modern society // ?" and noticed a problem with it. She said in our focus question we're assuming that the Khmer Rouge was already bad even before providing any evidence as proof, that's why we were having trouble formulating a hypothesis. Ms. Woud helped us make our question non judgemental and simple "//What was the impact of the Khmer Rouge Revolution and how does it contribute to our society today?//" which really helped us because it's a lot easier for us now. Symplifying our focus question made it easier and more simple to create our hypothesis. It is "//The Khmer Rouge Revolution negatively impacted on Cambodia's people at that time and has contributed to society in a number of ways.//" This is a lot better than any of our previous hypothesis's because they were just too complex for us to research right now. Ms. Woud said comparing the Khmer Rouge which is a past government to the Australian government which is a modern government would be far to hard for high school students to do. This explains all of our groups constant problems.
 * //__Term 1, Week 8 Thursday -- After school [24/03/11]__//**

__//**Term 1, Week 8 Friday Lesson 3 [25/03/11]**//__ Sara and I informed Nhi and Hien about the discussion we had with Ms. Woud and the changes that she suggested for us to make. They were a bit irritated that our focus question is similar to the one we had a few weeks back but as Nhi said its all about the learning process. We spent the lesson configuring our research scaffold. We were all quiet happy about not having to research about the Australian government anymore because we aren't using it. This takes a load off of our backs and takes some pressure off of us of not finishing on time. So now finally after almost a whole term spent formulating our perfect focus question and hypothesis, we're on our way to researching and analysing information to try and draw a conclusion for our topic.

__//**Term 1, Week 8 Sunday -- State Library [27/03/11]**//__ Nhi, Hien and I went to the State Library today to try and find some information from books and to also find out if we could go through old newspapers to find anything about the Cambodian Revolution. Unfortunately Sara couldn't make it to this library session because she had other matters to attend to. We arrived at 2pm so we had 3 hours to go through some books. We didn't get a chance to look through old newspapers because we were so focused on looking through the books for information that we totally lost track of time. By the time we realised that we had to use some time to go through newspapers it was already 4.30pm and it was too late, but we still went over to the newspaper section and had a look to see if we could find any useful information for future reference. The newspapers were all kept in organised films; like a camera. We had to put that film reel on to a special machine and go through them. We didn't know how to use one so we decided to ask next time. Even though we didn't get to look through the newspapers Nhi and Hien still got pretty good information from the books. I did not get as much information as I would have liked because I spent 2 and a half hours looking through books and wondered why I wasn't finding much information for my guiding question which is "//Who were the Khmer Rouge and who was their dictator? And how did they gain political dictatorship over Cambodia?//" and I found out that I was trying to find information on the Cambodian Revolution in the wrong time frame. I thought it was from 1970 - 1975 but afterwards I asked Nhi and Hien and they told me it was actually from 1975 - 1979! I was so frustrated about that. I spent 2 hours and a half looking at the wrong information. Next time I go to the library I'm definately going to find some good information, now that I know the right period of time that Pol Pot actually reigned. But even though I was looking at the wrong time period, I still got some information.

__//**Information from the State Library books: **//__ __//**Photos taken from the books I looked at: **//__

Term 1, Week 9 Monday - Friday [28/03/11 - 1/04/11] This week was all spent on finding information and analysing it on our scaffold.

Term 1, Week 10 I've looked at quite a lot of different websites to find who the main leaders of the Khmer Rouge were and to use cross-referencing to find out if the information on a website is accurate and the same as what another website said. The information I found and the bibliography can be found on the group scaffold called 'SHSN's Research Project Scaffold [FINALISED FOR TERM 1]' above. Here are some pictures of the main leaders taken from this website Cambodian Information Centre, 1995, //Khmer Rouge Page,// accessed 6/05/11 <[]>:

The people of Cambodia did not know what the future held for them after the end of the civil war between Cambodia and Vietnam. When the Khmer Rouge troops came back into Phnom Penh celebrating their victory over Vietnam the people of Cambodia celebrated with them because they thought it would be peaceful in Cambodia once again. They were terribly wrong, for not long after, the Khmer Rouge troops executed the most sudden evacuation of the whole city, warning the civilians that America was going to drop lots of bombs on to the city and to flee to the country side to be safe. The civilians obeyed the troops and all fled to the country side not knowing that this was all a hoax to get all the Cambodian people to the country side for the beginning of what is called the 'Khmer Rouge Revolution' today, lead by Saloth Sar as prime minister of the Communist Khmer Rouge Government. [Refer to our scaffold for references]





__//**Term 1, Week 11 Monday - Friday [11/04/11 - 15/04/11]**//__ On Monday Hien suggested that we all plan days to get together to work on our research project on the holidays right now so that we know when everybody is not busy. So we brainstormed what we still have left to do to complete our research project and when we should do these tasks on the school holidays. __//**Our need to do list:**//__ __//**Our optional to do list:**//__ We then made a schedule for when we should do each of these tasks. We haven't planned exactly which days we are going to meet up yet. But we'll do it soon.
 * //**Analyse our survey results - First we have to promote them and hand printed copys out.**//
 * //**Conduct our interviews**//
 * **//Translate Sara's mum's journal for Nhi//**
 * **//Perfect our scaffolds//**
 * **//Analyse interview with Polpot and Khmer rouge National Anthem//**
 * **//Brainstorm ideas for video - Our final product//**
 * **//Draw up a conclusion//**
 * **//Answer final guiding question//**
 * //**Make a timeline of the events of the Khmer Rouge**//
 * **//Go on Ebsco Host to find newspaper articles//**

On Tuesday we copied our whole survey into a Microsoft Word document. We had to do some rearrangeing of some things on the survey because some questions and answer boxes were scrambled up. After that we printed it out to photocopy later and hand it out to a variety of people. People we are planning to hand the survey to are history and sose teachers, students, friends and family.

On Wednesday we printed out our survey and photocopied 30 copies to hand out to people. Sara said she'll ask her Kumon teachers to take our survey. Nhi said she'll ask some parents, teachers and students tonight at parent teacher interview night, to take our survey. Hien said she'll ask some people at her vietnamese school to take our survey. I am going to ask my family and friends to take our survey. Today we also discussed about the days we are planning to get together to share our information and work on our project more. We decided we would meet at Sara's house on Monday.

__//**Term 1 HOLIDAYS, Monday -- Sara's House [18/04/11]**//__ Today the whole group met up at Sara's house to work on our research project. We had a discussion about our surveys and how we were going to analyse them. We only had around 60 participants so far and I realised that we shouldn't analyse the surveys until we get 100 participants, since this will make it a lot easier for us to analyse and get a percentage later. I told the group about my thoughts and they agreed so we decided to promote our surveys further to make up 100 participants in the survey. After that, we talked about our final video product. Nhi suggested that we don't do a video and instead do a power point oral presentation because it would look better while we present, instead of just sitting down after introducing ourselves. I thought it was a good idea to do the power point because I agreed that sitting down and doing nothing while the video played to the audience was a display of bad presentation skills. After that we went on with promoting our survey to reach 100 participants. Each of us logged on to our Windows Live Messenger accounts to ask our friends to do our survey. We each got a few people and by the end of the day we only needed a few more. No other people were online, so Hien and I decided to put our survey up on our facebook pages and wait until the next time we meet up to see if any more people took our survey.

__//** ﻿Term 1 HOLIDAYS, Thursday -- My House [21/04/11] **//__ We finally achieved 100 participants for our survey. We went straight into analysing the results and coming up with generalisations. While we were analysing the results we discovered a lot of limitations in our survey causing the participants to appear to be answering the questions questions randomly because they were getting confused about what we were asking them. From the limitations, we learnt that we have to be a lot more clear about the questions we are asking. We then had a group brainstorm and wrote dot points for what could be included in our conclusion so we will be more clear of how we're going to conclude our presentation when we come to making it. After that we had a talk with Adrian, my older brother, about left wing and right wing governments. He made a comment in our survey about the Khmer Rouge government using extreme right-winged tactics in order to create an extreme left-winged government system. We didn't understand what he meant so we asked him about it. He explained it to us and we all learnt that right winged government means capitalism; someone is the overall leader and he takes action to favour his own ideas over any other and left winged government means communism; everyone is equal but the country/nation comes first. I thought this was a really good explanation of what the Khmer Rouge government was like. I believe it would be a very good thing to mention in our presentation. We talked about it and we all agreed that we should mention this during our presentation. After that we revised our interview questions to make sure we asked enough questions to cover what we wanted to know and then Sara emailed it to Mr. Chau, her teacher that has lived under the Khmer Rouge government.

Term 2:

__//**Term 2, Week 1 Monday - Friday [2/05/11 - 6/05/11]**//__ On Monday Nhi and I decided to start making the timeline of the important events that happened during the Pol Pot's regime. We're making the timeline to hand out to the audience while we do our final presentation to help the audience follow along with the events. Our goal is to try and finish the timeline by the end of the week.

Ms. Lawless came back from her long service leave this term and is now our Integrated Learning teacher instead of Mr. Stav. My group got together on Wednesday to tell Ms. Lawless about what our research is about and where we were up to. While we were explaining our research and the learning process we took to get to where we were, we all realised that for our research project in year 12 we must narrow down our focus question or else it will be really difficult and we will have a lot of problems with our next research topic; like we have experienced in our current research topic. After we explained our research to Ms. Lawless, we asked her if she knew whether the scaffold really had a 1000 word limit or not, because we thought 1000 words was way too little for the scaffold to be in depth. We also asked which week the final presentations were supposed to be. Ms. Lawless was not sure but she told us that she would ask Ms. Woud in an upcoming research project meeting.

__//**Term 2, Week 2 Monday - Friday [9/05/11 - 13/05/11]**//__ Nhi and I finished the draft copy of the timeline last week so this week we have started on the good copy. Our goal is to complete it by the end of the week. All of us also analysed our survey responses on Monday. We finished analysing the surveys on Tuesday and we formed conjectures from the responses. We also looked at what we were going to put in our conclusion and we realised that we aren't really sure what kind of conclusion we actually want. We thought about changing our hypothesis to something along the lines of "equality" or "we should feel lucky because...", but we decided not to because then we would have to research more and we really don't have the time for that anymore at this stage. When we evaluate and reflect on our learning and process, we could write about this problem.

On Wednesday Sara suggested that we make a planner for what we should work on and when to finish them by for the remaining weeks of integrated learning before the final presentations. We decided to make this schedule because it would help to keep us on task and stay organised. We wrote that this week should be spent updating our journals and for Nhi and myself to finish off the timeline. Today, Ms. Lawless also informed us that she had a discussion with Ms. Woud and she learnt that the scaffold doesn't necessarily need to be finished but it could still be used as evidence of work and learning.

Today we also learnt that the reason why we always encounter so many problems is because each member of our group always interprets questions different and approach it in different ways; it is not because we lack communication because, as mentioned in my journal, we always go through lengthy discussions.

__//** Term 2, Week 3 Monday - Friday [16/05/11 - 20/05/11] **//__ On Monday, Nhi and I finished the good copy of the timeline. We're going to print it out and make photocopies of it to hand out to the audience on the day of our presentation. Today Ms. Lawless brought in some examples of completed integrated learning projects from the year 11 class in 2010. My group and I had a thorough look through one of the folders. We learnt a lot from this folder, like how to arrange our own folder into their separate sections and how to answer some of the evaluation questions.

On Wednesday my group talked about when would be a good time to go shopping together to buy our project folder and how to arrange it and also what work we already have that is okay to print off and put in the folder. We decided that we would go to buy the folder in Arndale on Thursday after school. We then went on to our computers to write down what we will print after we buy the folder. After that, Hien, Sara and I fixed up our concept maps on Photoshop and the Paint program while Nhi put our other completed concept maps on to Word, getting them ready to print. Ms. Lawless also gave out a hand out today of DeBono's Six Thinking Hats because our evaluation includes something to do with the six thinking hats. I remember learning about these in year 6 in primary school. When Ms. Lawless handed the sheet out, I recognised the hats straight away and I still remember what each hat represents.
 * Black Hat = What were the bad/negative points?
 * White Hat = What are the facts?
 * Red Hat = What are your feelings/What is your gut reaction?
 * Yellow Hat = What are the good/positive points?
 * Green Hat = What are the possibilities/creativity?
 * Blue Hat = Thinking about thinking

__//**Term 2, Week 4 Monday - Friday [23/05/11 - 27/05/11]**//__ On Monday I started working on my part of the presentation speech because the other members of my group were working on other jobs like the survey report.

On Wednesday Hien discovered a great new website that had newspapers that were about the Khmer Rouge Revolution and which were also published during the time of Pol Pot's regime. Hien asked me to help her explore the website to get all the relevant newspapers from there. We spent the whole double going through the newspapers and discussing if they were useful to us and copying the web addresses of the useful newspapers for the bibliography. We gave Nhi the information we found because we thought it would be useful for her section.

__//**Term 2, Week 5 Monday - Friday [30/05/11 - 3/06/11]**//__ On Monday, the group had a group discussion about how much time we have left until we need to present our work. We concluded that we needed to have our individual transcipts and power points finished by wednesday so we could put them altogether and then get on with making them flow and do some final editing of each others' work.

On Tuesday, we were still a bit stuck on what to write for our conclusion because there were so many approaches that we could conclude our research and we couldn't decide which one was suitable for the information that we have gathered. Sara and Nhi suggested that we probably have this problem because we keep changing our research and I agree with them. I'll definitely make sure that I don't change my research around so much when I do my own in stage 2. We asked Ms. Lawless to help us with the conclusion. Ms. Lawless helped us get slightly back on track by suggesting some things we could say in our conclusion like, how the media has a big impact and influence on revolutionary movements today.

__//**Term 2, Week 6 Monday - Friday [6/06/11 - 10/06/11]**//__ Everyone worked hard last week to finish off our separate parts of the transcript but we didn't get anytime to do our powerpoints. So on Monday, Nhi and Sara worked on getting our transcript to flow and editing out some sections which were not needed or that were repeated while Hien and I made a start on our group power point. Ms. Lawless also introduced us to a website that talked about the current Egyptian Revolution and she told us how that could be connected to our research and how we could incorporate that into our conclusion.

On Wednesday, Hien and I continued to work on the power point while Sara and Nhi worked on the transcript. We managed to finish the power point except for the conclusion section because we're still figuring that part out. The power point is more like a draft at the moment because we still might change things around.

I left for Sydney with my family on Thursday. My family plan to come back to Adelaide on Tuesday night so I will be able to attend the double lesson on Wednesday and practise with my group for the presentation on Friday of week 7. While I was in Sydney, I asked the group how the power point and transcript was going on Windows Live Messenger while I was in Sydney so I was kept updated.

__//**Term 2, Week 7 Thursday - Friday [16/06/11 - 17/06/11]**//__ My flight back to Adelaide was cancelled on Tuesday night due to the volcanic ash that was hovering over Adelaide from a volcanic eruption in Chile. I told my group about the situation and we were really worried that I wouldn't be able to get back to Adelaide in time for our presentation. I was able to make it back to Adelaide on Wednesday night so I was able to make it to Sara's house on Thursday night to practise with the group for the presentation on Friday. At Sara's house on Thursday the group told me what I needed to know for the presentation and I had a look at the final edited transcript and power point to get familiar with what I missed out on. Then we got on to practising straight away. We timed ourselves and ran it through around 5 times before we were happy with it. Our presentation goes for 20 mintues and we realise this is a bit long for the presentation but we won't be able to do anything about it now. We just have to go with it now and make sure we don't do it again when we do our stage 2 research project. We did our presentation on Friday. It went pretty well. We got really good feedback from our peers and Ms. Lawless except for the fact that we presented for a very long time.

__//**Term 2, Week 8 Monday - Friday [20/06/11 - 24/06/11]**//__ On Wednesday, Sara and Nhi worked on the final editing of our bibliography/reference section while Hien and I worked on getting our journals finished for handing up on Friday.

On Thursday, Nhi, Sara, Hien and I went into Lower Penny building to sort out which work we could print out in black and white for the folder. We sorted out all our work and I took them all on my USB because I'm going to my mum's workplace to use the fast printer there to print out approximately 50 pages.