Engage

**The Engage Stage**
Each unit begins with a lesson that mentally engages students with an activity or question. It captures their interest, provides an opportunity for them to express what they know about the concept or skill being developed, and helps them to make connections between what they know and the new ideas.

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Getting students involved and interested in the topic can sometimes be a task but we found this news feed which updates and shows every earthquake around the globe as it happens. It is a great way to keep students updated with the earthquakes around the world and it gets the students thinking why does this happen?

**RSS feed** This allows the students to view current events without moving away from the page, in this instance we are able to view the earthquakes that have been happening around the world in the last few hours

rss url="feed://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/shakemap/rss.xml" link="true" number="10"

**Wallwisher** Wall wisher is an interactive way for students to post idea's or questions to the teacher or other class members. Its a fantastic way for students to interact in a safe manner with the teacher being able to control what goes on the wall. Instead of using the whiteboard students can sit in their seats, research and post information on the wall for others to read.

To engage students we have used the wall wisher program in which they can refer to for any information that they might have found on earthquakes. The reason why we chose wall wisher for the engage stage is so that all students can post and share some of the interesting findings that they have found.

[|Wall Wisher]

**Learning focus - VELS** As students work towards the achievement of Level 4 standards in Geography, they investigate some of the significant natural processes that operate across Australia (for example, rainfall, drought, flood, earthquake, cyclones and bushfire), and how people react to them, including their preparation for, and management of, natural disasters.

**Lesson idea's**
 * Because its an open forum students can look up anything they wanted to know about earthquakes, they can choose what they want to share and what they want to keep for themselves. What the students look at depends on what they want to know, for example some students might want to know how and earthquake starts? others may just look at famous earthquakes and the destruction that was left behind.

To continue to the explore stage click here