INTERGRATING E-LEARNING TO SUPPORT THE INQUIRY PROCESS:

By attending Kath Murdoch’s PD session it gave me the motivation to have a Wonder Wall and create a systematic process for students to religiously understand and apply in everyday thinking.  I have chosen to make big question bubbles each with heading relating to figure out questions for the topic which is displayed in the middle with a picture.  I have displayed questions and statements by students to be very clearly visualized, this is effective as it is easily replace as well.

To guide the class to working towards meeting the success indicator.

To start off our inquiry learning I will pose a question to all students to discuss in pairs, what do you wonder about?  I allow the students talk for a few moments and then I let the students share while I make a list of all the things they wonder.  We then place the wonderings at the bottom of the bar graph; I then gave the students the option of placing three bits of paper to the topic they would like to learn about the most.  The students had fun with this and it allowed the class to know what we would move on to next.  The bar graph will be displayed until the inquiry topic is finished.  The result of this bar graph was Earth! 

Each thought and question is visually displayed with their name beside it for ownership.  The students will write a statement relating to either, what do we wonder? What do we think? What do we like? What do we see? And what have we learnt? On a piece of paper and put it in our wonder box, when they’re done we then pulled the questions out and put them on the appropriate heading. We read them out and started the learning process.  I do organise the statements presentable by rewriting the questions on a star shaped post-it with their names displayed.

Now for the inquiry part: we used the computer lab useful for this task.  I used a K.W.H. (What I know? What I want to know? How will I find out? What I have learnt? Worksheet on word for the students to open and we went through each heading.

The big question: how will we know we have found the answers to my questions?

The students learnt how to order their thoughts as a digi class, search through the net for the correct information via the same information from three other web pages, copy and paste useful information to answer their questions.  The hardest part for the student was scanning for the answers to their questions.

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

We have also had other related topic inquiry learning processes to link to our main inquiry topic such as:

• Volcano, Night and Day, Earthquakes, Pollution and Layers of Earth.

Each topic had their own questions for the students to order and inquire.

Once students came up with all the evidence of answers they were given the choice to present their findings on:

• Power Point, Microsoft Word layout, or displayed on a presentation board.
• We will then have all our evidence shown on our inquiry expedition day which will include some mobiles, models and all the presentations mentioned above.

Students have worked really well with these tasks and the proof of inquiry learning is in the pudding! So to speakJ

How could you take this further?

Room 1 have used varies of tools to help with inquiry learning and did experiments to broaden the students mind also we have integrated art and poetic writing to describe earth along with varies of ways to present our finding so I think maybe I could incorporate a digital story process or movie maker for students to act as reporters, this will incorporate key competencies as an attribute relating to types of characters in the real world. 

Please visit Room 1's blog to take a glimps of our wonderful work!

www.somersetwonderfulones@blogspot.com