INTERGRATING E-LEARNING TO SUPPORT THE INQUIRY PROCESS:

After having been to the Kath Murdoch PD session and looking at what other teachers had been doing I decided to create a wonder window. Here I would put up different wonderings that students would come up with from across the curriculum. Like others I placed the student’s picture by the wondering which helped with the students seeing that what they had said was important and not just some silly question that would be brushed off.

To guide the class to working towards meeting the success indicator

I decided that it was important that the students learn the process of inquiry first.  So using our school fale’ inquiry model as our guide we decided to choose one of the wonderings from the window and find the answer to the question.  During one of my daily reading lessons, one of my groups was reading a book about bees.  The question asked was, “How does the bee keepers get the bees into the beehive?”  This became our big question.   We started by recording all our prior knowledge about bees, which was very interesting because much of this information resembled things from the cartoon bee movie.  Next we wrote down all the things we wanted to know about bees (generated questions).   Finally we created posters showing all the bee facts we had found.

 Linking this to other areas of the curriculum, I needed to look at the where we would get our information, the how do we know if it is trust worthy, and how we could reference where we found our information.  So for my U ROCK lesson I focussed on the internet as a resource and how we as 20^th century learners need to become informed and responsible for the way we use today’s technology.   We looked at who creates web sites, this was a real eye opener for me as not one student had any idea.  As they said only famous people could do this e.g. John Key, The Queen.  By going on google and looking up how to create a web site, the students realised that anyone could do this.     We decided that we would need to look at a number of web pages to check if the information was similar.  As a way of referencing we would simply copy the address bar at the top of our facts creating a link in case we should need to cross check information.

What evidence did you use to decide if this learning activity was successful?    

By following this process the way we did, the evidence was there in front of us.  Students had collected a number of pages full of facts which they would filter through to find what they wanted to put on their posters.  Their posters showed the answers to their questions.  Finally I asked the class had we answered Danny-Bo’s question.  With a number of ideas given to me, we then watched a Youtube clip showing the answer.  The students were quite proud of themselves, when they realised that they were right. 

I showed them their original ideas of what they knew about bees and we saw that some of their thinking was totally wrong, whereas some was correct but they were now able to give more information with their answer eg. Students said that a bee dies after it has stung someone.  Now they would tell you that when the stinger gets stuck in someone’s arm, it has been ripped away from the bee’s abdomen, causing it to die.       

  How could you take this further?

Students are now using this same process to answer one of their own wonderings.  I’ll guess we will see at the end if this has been a success or the where to next. 

http://ratasevens.blogspot.co.nz/