learning design

Inquiry Mindset

elissahallidayLeave a comment

In my technology class, I had the opportunity to visit Rebecca Bathurst-Hunts classroom and listen to her speak about her opinion on an inquiry mindset in the elementary classroom. Rebecca teaches a french-immersion kindergarten class and believes that inquiry is an important style of learning in the classroom.

Rebecca had many unique and interesting ideas on learning. She believes that you should begin learning with questions in order to get students minds active and to allow for more student voice. This can be done by starting the lesson with a picture or a gif (which I found was a really cool idea) and asking the students 3 questions: what they see, what they know, and what they wonder. I personally believe this is a great way to get students engaged in the lesson and I will definitely use this as I prepare to go into the classroom.

She also talked a lot of inquiry-based learning and the different types. There is Structured inquiry in which the teacher leads the class in an inquiry question that they all engage in together. Rebecca suggests starting off with this inquiry style as it allows students to develop the basic skills needed for inquiry work. Next, there is Controlled inquiry where students answer questions based off of topics that are given by the teacher. In this style, the teacher also identifies the resources. Then there is Guided inquiry where the teacher will choose the topic or question and then the students will find the product or solution. Lastly, there is Free inquiry where the students choose their own topics and the inquiry is totally in their control. Rebecca mentioned how she does not always get to this stage in the inquiry process during one school year. I have heard of inquiry learning, but have never learned about the different types of it. I found this really useful as I love the idea of inquiry-based learning in elementary classrooms, but always thought it would be tough to give the young students so much freedom. I am excited that there is a way I can use inquiry learning in my classroom.

Rebecca had a very welcoming classroom due to all her different setups in the class, such as a cave/tented area meant for quiet time, desk areas for collaborative work, desk areas for pair work or quiet work, a main carpeted area where the whole class can go, and more! One thing that really stuck out to me in her classroom was a wall she had made into a “Wonder Wall”. This wonder wall had pictures of all the students in the class with thought bubbles beside them where she had written something that the student wonders about. I really liked this idea and thought it was a great way to share the student’s ideas with their peers.

All in all, I learned a lot from seeing Rebecca’s classroom and listening to her perspective on an inquiry mindset in the classroom. I gained a lot of information that will be useful to me in my years to come. I am thankful for this opportunity as I learned a lot about engaging students.

Curation – Diigo and Feedly

elissahallidayLeave a comment

In my Technology Innovation class, we talked about curation and a few resources that assist users in collaborating with others and organizing resources. Two specifically that we talked about were Diigo and Feedly.

d.jpg

Diigo is a social bookmarking website launched in 2006,  standing for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other Stuff”. Diigo allows its users to tag and bookmark web pages. This is a helpful resource because it allows for you to get easy access to these saved pages. It helps you to stay organized and you can share these resources with others. Diigo designed their app so you can save bookmarks through tags, which makes it easier for you to find the resources you are looking for later. For example, if you are researching about travel tips you can create a tag named travel tips, so then when you are wanting to see these resources you can go to the tag instead of looking through all your bookmarks. The bookmarking tool helps you stay organized and allows you to easily find your resources.

Another useful tool of Diigo is the highlighting and sticky note tool. The highlighting tool allows you to highlight important parts of a text directly on the website. Highlighting is helpful for you to remember which parts of the text you thought were important and were wanting to remember, and also to share with others and show which parts you wanted them to see. The sticky notes tool lets you add notes, comments or reminders directly onto the webpage. This is another great feature that is very useful for both the user and for collaborating with colleagues, students, peers, etc. As a university student, both of these features would be extremely helpful to me for researching and collaborating with my peers.

Diigo is a great tool for curating, organizing bookmarks, highlighting text, adding sticky notes of information to web pages and collaborating with others.

feedly.jpg

The other web tool we discussed was Feedly. Feedly was released in 2008 and was created to be used as a news aggregator and to help you discover insightful sources. Meaning it finds similar news feeds from various online sources and groups them together for easy access and viewing. The user can then customize this and share their sources with others. Feedly has an app that is available on both iPhone and Android making it accessible for many people. It is a great tool to discover many useful online sources, such as news publications, blogs, and youtube videos. Feedly allows its users to organize their work and collaborate with others.

Feedly is another great curating tool that allows you to discover sources in an organized and customized way and to share with your teammates.

All in all, I learned a lot about curation and gained two great resources to help me organize sources and collaborate with my peers. These will be useful applications for me to use in the classroom.

Diigo’s website: https://www.diigo.com/

Feelys website: https://feedly.com/i/welcome

 

Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry School Visit

elissahallidayLeave a comment

In my Technology Education class, we went on a school visit to observe Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. It is a newer high school in Victoria, that offers a personalized education. This school has been operating for six years and has 85 students attending. It is a private school, but the tuition is more affordable than most private schools. PSI does not want to create more schools, but wants to be a model to other schools and hopefully show them that they can do it too.

At this school, they focus on inquiry-based learning, where students are told they can ask anything. Their inquiry process is to find an initial question then do some research and from that research create a better inquiry question. These inquiries can be anywhere from a week long to a year long. The staff recommends doing three inquiry projects at one time, so students stay engaged and always have something to do. The inquiry process is a lot of build, make, try and experiment, not just research. The students have the opportunity to go work with the community and get hands-on experience. For example, one year a student wanted to learn about boat building, so they worked with a boat builder for one year. I think this is a really cool idea and allows the students to get a good hands-on experience, which is valuable to find your interests.

The learning design is much different than most high schools. They do not test at this school, they put learning in the student’s hands and their success is based on their engagement. The learning environment is meant for the students to succeed, they want there to be a joy in learning for the students. The students build there own daily schedules to be what they want to be working on and can include breaks to go get some exercise etc. A tablet is used to sign in and out that says where they are going and when they will be back. This allows students the freedom to leave when they want to better their learning process. They still have report cards, as it is needed to go onto university or college, so the teachers meet three times a year to put students inquiries into courses – subjects are integrated within each other and their inquiry questions. IMG_9597

I personally have never been to a school like this. It was a very cool experience to get to go observe it and it gave me, as an aspiring teacher, a different way of looking at learning. I really like how PSI puts learning in the student’s hands and allows them to research topics they want to know more about. I think this ensures the student’s engagement into school and is of value to them in their future. I am happy I got to experience this school as it gave me a lot of ideas that I could implement in my classroom to create an effective and engaging learning environment.

PSI’s Website: http://learningstorm.org/

Tech Tool Review – Google Apps for Education (GAFE)

elissahallidayLeave a comment

Google Apps for Education (GAFE) also called G Suite is a tool available for teachers and schools for free. It allows people to collaborate and communicate with their peers, teachers, and colleagues. These apps include Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs and Sites.

Some ways that Google apps are being used in schools are to easily manage your classroom by creating classes, distributing assignments or quizzes, giving feedback to students and having everything organized in one place. It is simple to operate and you can manage it with confidence. Students and teachers can collaborate anywhere and anytime by co-editing documents and presentations.  Another way it can be used is to compose to-do lists, set task reminders, and to organize your schedule. Google apps enables you to communicate in many different ways, such as email, chat, video conference or you can even create your own website. The reasons why educators choose to use GAFE is because it is easy, affordable, versatile and impactful. The only downside to using Google apps is that it is absolutely necessary to have access to a device, which often some kids don’t.

The tool website is: https://edu.google.com/intl/en_ca/k-12-solutions/g-suite/?modal_active=none

We already use numerous Google apps, therefore we would both consider using it in our classrooms.

GAFE is widely tweeted about and discussed on almost every social media platform.

Below are some helpful video tutorials and resources:

 

~ Elissa and Eliza