Queen Victoria Building

Let's visit this shopping centre!

One of the most important shopping centre in Sydney is the Queen Victoria Building (QVB). It was built as a market hall between 1893 and 1898 and it is crowned by a high central dome. After decades of plans for demolition, this grand building was restored to its original state in the early eighties.

Today, a visitor can go into more than 200 shops. If you ever visit Sydney, it's worth a visit to admire its successful restoration and its beautiful stained glass windows and mosaic floors.

At the end of the session, you will have:

discovered the Queen Victoria Building and known more about Sydney Olympic Games 2000.
learnt how to transform active sentences into passive ones.
started your collaborative Google Site in groups about the city of Sydney.

Continue with your posts on Twitter (#taskpodcast and #EDIAsydney). The 'Rubric to assess a Tweet' can help you do a good job in this social network.

Visit the official Queen Victoria Building website and take a look at the Store map of this shopping centre. Choose some of them and visit their websites.

Which shop would you recommend? Send a tweet with the URL of the shop you have finally chosen explaining what you can buy in that shop. Remember to use the hashtags of this project.

Remember that the Queen Victoria Building must be part of the route at your Google Sites map.

The Olympic Games were held in Sydney in the year 2000

After finishing this project, you and your classmates will have created a full range of different podcasts about several topics of your interest. One of the most common linguistic structure English language has and that you can use in your podcast is the passive voice.

Why do we use the passive voice in English? There are different reasons but first we are going to focus on how can we transform an active sentence into a passive one.

ACTIVE VOICE: The athlete fails the jump.

PASSIVE VOICE: The jump is failed by the athlete

Ian @ ThePaperboy.com. *mens high jump* (CC BY)

As you can check in the previous sentences, the structure of the passive voice in English is not difficult at all. After getting familiar with this new structure, start getting familiar with these other changes from active to passive voice.

Apart from this, if you want to know more details about the Olympic Games that were held in Sydney in the year 2000, don't finish this module without visiting its official website. Did you know any of the Top Medallists that year? Do you want to know any of the results of those summer Olympic Games?

Send a tweet using the project hashtags (#taskpodcast and #EDIAsydney) with one of the results or the sportsperson that you find interesting or curious about your favourite Olympic sport. The 'Rubric to assess a Tweet' can help you do a good job in this social network.

Challenge: English-speaking cities

Challenge Step 1: Open up a new Google Site and share it with your group

The challenge in this project is a Google site about English-speaking cities. In this challenge, we are going to work in groups of 2/3 people. The first step is to create the site using GOOGLE SITES

The rubric to evaluate a google map will be used to evaluate your work. Remember that you have to evaluate it once you have finished creating the route with the ten stops of each city.

You can have extra help watching the following video about registering and using Google Sites. One of the members of the group is going to be the leader and is going to open up the site and share it with the rest of the members of the group. Thus, the other members will be able to edit the site as well.

Bradley Lands. Google Sites Tutorial for Education (CC BY)

After having created the site, check that the whole group can edit it and start designing a landing page with the title English-Speaking Cities.
In this first page, you have to describe what your group is going to create collaboratively: a website with information about 10 of the most important English - speaking cities in the world, one city per project. In this project, we are going to work with the city of Sydney.
If you have created the google site previously, using another project from this series, you only have to add a new page to your Google site.
As you have to work in groups of 2/3 people, you can also use the website http://en.linoit.com/ to brainstorm your ideas, collect your links and reach an agreement on which digital materials you are going to use at your Google Site for Sydney even though you are working at home in different places of the same or different towns.

It is now time to start working collaboratively with your group. Remember to always follow all the steps. That way it will be easier for you to produce the final product of the challenge. Your teacher can always help you with all your doubts.

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