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Questar III BOCES SLS - Inquiry Based Learning Workshop
Dee Portzer, Mary Ratzer, Polly Farrington
March 7 & 8, 2008 - Rensselaerville Institute, Rensselaerville, NY
This page contains a selection of 2.0 tools and instructional examples of their uses to get you thinking about how you might use these tools to support your inquiry based learning projects. Many more school and library examples can be found on other parts of this wiki. Please explore!
It's all so overwhelming, but I know I need to move forward.
TOOLS DISCUSSED
Blogs
What are blogs good for?
Writing, critiquing, analyzing, research chronicle, journaling, sharing projects.
Replace the traditional 'log' notebook. Teacher can review log without student handing it in and being without it while it's being graded.
Students are more engaged in the writing process. they have a global audience, parents can be more involved, students can learn from each other, connections with students around the world.
Ways to use blogs:
Instructor sets up a blog and post topics for discussion. Students & instructors interact in the comments section
Students are co-editors of your blog and can post topics for discussion. Students & instructors interact through the comments section.
Each participant has their own blog that they can use for writing, reflection on a project, chronicle of a research project Instructor and other students can monitor blogs and participate through the comments.
Why let our students blog
(video from Rachel Boyd - an educator in New Zealand)
This is a terrific example of classroom blog. The students are aged 6 & 7. Presents their projects, poetry.writing. collaborations "celebrate, share and showcase our learning with you".
Class Blogmeister - This blogging service was set up with educators in mind. logs can be password. Set up a blog, add students as participants, review their work before it's posted.
EduBlogs - Educator blogging service based on Wordpress
Wordpress.com - a popular, free, easy to use blogging platform
Blogger.com - another popular, free, easy to use blogging platform
Tumblr - Share your words, pictures, videos and ideas quickly. Appealingly simple.
Video & audio projects offer wonderful opportunities for creativity. Students learn technology skills in using the equipment to record and software to edit. Creativity takes center stage in these projects. Organizational and presentation skills are learned while creating an effective, engaging project. And like so many technology tools, students are excited about creating and sharing their work using these tools.
Examples of audio & video work created by students and/or used for instruction.
Voices of the World - Classrooms around the world participating in an audio based project. Each month a new task for the students. Fun stuff!
A Ring for Jimmy - first video on the page. Video about doing a research paper, with a fun twist.
The Natural - Video trailer for the book. From Springfield Township High School.
Snakes and Snowsuits - This students in this class are sharing their learning with the world. They write on their blog, post pictures, create videos and more. This video is about snakes!
Watch out for the Silent E - check out how this teacher included a YouTube video in a lesson. (is there a copyright issue somewhere in this though?)
Cheshire Public Library Podcast - "The Cheshire Public Library Podcast is a teen-driven cultural magazine featuring teen writers, musicians, reviewers, commentators, and more."
Sims On Stage - The karaoke part of this is just plain fun! But take a look at the Stories section. Students can write and record their own stories and showcase them here.
Video Tools
Video camera - inexpensive Flip video cams are great. Many digital cameras record video too. Computer webcam. Regular video cam.
Video editor - Free options: Microsoft Windows Moviemaker, Mac IMovie
Hosting - host on YouTube, bliptv, or other free hosting service. Emed the videos on your web page, wiki, blog.
Audio Tools
USB Microphones - $20 will get you a reasonable microphone. Pay more for better quality
Inexpensive digital voice recorder to record audio on the go
Fast and easy? Try podcastpeople.com - you can record directly to their site and put your audio online immediately.
Wikis are perfect for team projects. Everyone on the team can add to and edit the group's project on a wiki page. It's as easy as clicking on the "edit" button and adding your content. Older versions of the edited pages are preserved, so students can retrieve earlier work if they want to. This history also lets you view the history of their work and who edited what. You can even leave comments for the students about their project. Other students can leave comments too.
Wikis also work well as a place for individual students to keep track of their notes and progress on a research project. Other students, teachers, parents (whoever you give access to) can also view the work and leave comments.
Students can use wikis as a portfolio of their work. It's easy to create links to other documents that they've created throughout a class. And this gives them a simple way to present all their work and offer reflections on their work as well.
Find other classroom partnere and collaborate with students around the world.
Examples of wikis in schools and libraries
Remember When - Memories of Ipswich -- Ipswich (Queensland) Public Library project to preserve memories and photos of seniors in the community. Great resource for students doing local history projects. I love this project. What a wonderful model for a collaborative community project with any combination of students, seniors, schools & libraries participating.
Flat Classroom Project - Students collaborated to discuss trends from Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat"
Room 15 Classroom Wiki 6th grade classroom wiki. Book reviews by students, news, homework, student writing.
Voices of the World - Classrooms around the world participating in an audio based project. Each month a new task for the students. Fun stuff!
Research Organizers
RSS feeds from newspapers, magazines, news sites, databases and other sites can help students keep up to date on their research topics. RSS does the fetching and students do the sorting, sifting and thinking!
You can add all sorts of content from newspapers, blogs, magazines, video sites, photo sites, and many many more resources.
Gather all your favorite content in one place, and when your favorite sites are updated, the newest content will appear on your personalized page.
For students this can help them gather information for research projects. And you can observe what sort of material they're using and help them find appropriate material.
These tools can also help students learn to organize and sort through content efficiently, helping them develop organizational skills.
Examples:
Darfur - A pageflakes page created by Will Richardson. He talks about uses of these types of pages on his blog.
Another Darfur page - this is a page based on Will Richardson's page, showing how easy it is to share and build on other's work. On this page, I've included an RSS feed of articles from an EBSCO database search. This brings great content out of the depths of our databases!
Sample Student Page - Pageflakes has a sample student page with a class organizer, calendar, grade tracker, to do list and more.
Journalism 2.0 - Resource page for a lesson on RSS and setting up feeds in Google Reader.
These research organizer examples are all based on the use of RSS to retrieve fresh content from selected resources and present it on a single page for easy review. Use this video from Commoncraft.com to explain how RSS works
flickr
Share photos of your school and activities. And use photos in creative ways to support lessons.
Explore using del.icio.usas a way to organize your favorite web sites. Students can use it too. Members of teams can share links easily. RSS feeds for links let you include the latest links on your blogs and wiki pages. Tons more info on this wiki's del.icio.us page.
Create your own customized search tools -- Rollyo and Google Customized Search are two tools that let you specify what sites to search, then give you a search box you can put on your web pages. Createa search box that searches just the best history sites or biology resources. Have students create their own search boxes for research projects.
TeacherTube - lots of good videos on all sorts of technology in education topics. A good place to find an intro to a topic you want to learn more about and to find examples of projects that are going on in classrooms. A real gold mine of ideas.
meez.com - Create avatars for use on online sites, blogs, etc. Students may not want to have their pictures online, avatars are a great alternative. Students get to experiment with different looks and identities.
I had fun creating one! This is what I might look like when I accept my next academy award....
HeroMachine - Create your own superhero identity!.
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