Jan-Marie's blog

I have been considering the matter of student ownership of the inquiry. Certainly the ideal situation is where students have full ownership of the initial question, idea, problem and/or issue.

However the reality in the primary school classroom is that many students don’t have the skills to come up with rich questions until these skills have been taught. Resourcing can also be a problem with completely student-generated inquiry. Setting students, especially younger children, loose to search in the books and on the internet until they have the necessary information literacy skills to do this effectively would result in a lot of surfing and not a lot of results. They are also going to waste a lot of time on sites that are not suitable for their age, reading skills and/or developmental level. Try telling your students they can’t start the inquiry for 2 weeks while you wait for the National Library books to arrive and you have had a chance to find some websites suitable for them to use. This is not to say that the web and National Library are the only sources of information but they are often important sources.

So what is the answer to this?  Last week I attended a Regional ICTPD cluster meeting and found a few ideas. Mark Treadwell spoke of resourcing difficulties and the use of guided inquiry where students discuss a topic and are guided into an investigation. In his article Education in the 21st Century Part 1 www.teachers.work.co.nz/archive_Nov_2004.htm Mark talks about Teacher Initated Learning Experiences, Shared Teacher-Student Initated Learning Experiences and Student Initated Learning Experiences. Barbara Reid clarified this further for me by referring to Shared, Guided and Independent Inquiry. We use this model when teaching reading and written language, why not inquiry?

In a guided inquiry for instance the teacher may display thought-provoking photos and then, when discussion ensues, guide the students to develop a rich question arising from that photo. Because the teacher has displayed the original photos they will have already been able to find some suitable resources. Students will of course also be able to find some of their own resources in addition to those supplied by the teacher but they will have a good resource base to start from. Students should have some degree of ownership as they have been part of the process of developing the inquiry focus. Eventually students would have sufficient skills to complete independent inquiries and this should be the aim.

One way I have approached this is by starting a discussion on a broad topic that my knowledge of my students tells me they have an interest in, and is one I know I can resource. I then encourage students to come up with their own question(s) for inquiry, with help from me to guide them in framing a rich question.

Students also often need some background in the topic before they can frame a rich question. I have often started with a teacher guided inquiry then branched off onto an independent student-directed inquiry which arose from that topic. For example, we were looking at Antarctica and the discussion, directed by me, got round to what there is to do and see in Antarctica. The students investigated this and came up with their ideas on what a tourist visiting Antarctica should go and see. While doing this some students started to have doubts about whether tourists should be allowed to go to Antarctica at all and this led into a separate inquiry topic of which they had full ownership.

I really enjoyed my discussions with people at the e-fellows’ table at TUANZ Hamilton and Tauranga. It was great to get into some interesting e-learning discussions. I was really impressed with some of the work being done by Adrian Bruce and will be checking out his site to find out more.

Here are a few of the links to sites I mentioned in my presentation on using Interactive whiteboards for reading and language.

• http://www.sabine.k12.la.us/zes/teeth/default.htm  Teeth and dental health sites for all ages.
• http://www.nationalgeographic.com/kids/creature_feature/0202/hedgehogs2.html Scroll down to find a list of other hedgehog sites
• http://www.iknowthat.com/com This has the scrambled story under language in the side bar, but also has lots of other great activities covering all curriculum areas. You don't need to register or subscribe to use the activities.
• http://www.public.asu.edu/%7Emschmeec/rainsplash.html The impact of a raindrop
• http://www.quia.com/mc/512.html erosion matching activity.

 The URL of the music file page mentioned by Marnie at the whiteboards session at TUANZ Tauranga: http://www.ilovewaves.com/.

Just a little shot of my students from last year working on one of their laptops.

The second and most important part of an ICt-rich environent is of course what teachers do with the ICTs they have and this I feel is a little harder to define. Is it frequency of use or quality of use or a combination of both? Quality must be an important factor I feel but how do we judge that? I am thinking along the lines of the levels of use from “Teacher Beliefs and Practices, Part 1 of 2 (Report #8, 1990).”( Dwyer, Ringstaff, Haymore & Sandholtz  http://images.apple.com/education/k12/leadership/acot/pdf/rpt08.pdf )  where teacher use of technology is classified into five levels: Entry, Adoption, Adaptation, Appropriation and Invention. There are other similar models such as  Knezek & Christensen’s six stage model: Awareness, Learning the process, Understanding and application of the process, Familiarity and confidence, Adaptation to other contexts and Creative application to new contexts (Computers in NZ Schools 11(3) 1999). At which level would there be an ict-rich environment? Comments welcomed.

I have decided I need a place share my insights from my research so far. Even though it is early days, I have found that listening to some of the speakers at the Learning@schools conference and also the reading I have done, has begun to alter/clarify my thinking. I have started a page in my school's KnowledgeNet site where I can share my thoughts as they are a little too long to include in a blog. You will need to click on public pages on the login screen then select the link in the newsletter or click on the + beside welcome in the side navigation bar to find the page.

The keynote from Marc Prensky was very thought-provoking. I don’t agree with everything Marc said but I certainly got his point about student engagement. Don’t think I’m quite ready to let cellphones into the classroom but I am certainly aware of the engagement level of games and believe we should be using this.

Sharon Friesen from Galileo had a lot to say that resonated with me. The “just because we can, does that mean we should?” question can apply to so many situations and is certainly something we should be asking ourselves and our students. I also took her points about asking compelling questions, investigating systematically, creating in the media of our times, building knowledge in the community, doing the work the world needs, working at the edge of ingenuity and creating a public record. The three key words, Innovate, Collaborate and Transform, mentioned by Sharon are worth keeping in mind whenever planning an inquiry-based unit for students.

I also enjoyed sharing my e-fellows research project plan and presenting a session about using interactive whiteboards for reading and language. It is always good to get feedback from other teachers about what you are doing.

I have just returned from the Learning@Schools conference in Rotorua. I really got a lot out of this conference; I think I took away something I could use from every session. The practical sessions on Flash (Richard Bradley) and Morphing (David Young) gave me some new skills to use. I found Richard Cootes’ “Creating a Problem-based Learning Environment” session very valuable, it just shows what quality resources can be developed with sufficient funding (thanks to the Tindall Foundation). There was a discussion during the session about whether we should be providing kids with resources like these or making them do their own searches, but I think it has to do with what our learning outcomes are. If we are aiming to develop search skills then certainly this is not the best way to do it, although there are still a lot of skills needed to gain the relevant information from resources like these. However if our aims include things like developing higher order thinking and transformation of knowledge, then this is a very efficient way of providing information sources for students. I’m sure the CD could be supplemented with other sources of information to allow for development of independent search skills. I can’t help thinking how great it is to have a record of interviews with people like the holocaust survivor and Vietnam vet. It would be a great pity if their stories were lost.

Christmas came early for the e-fellows this year with Melissa from HP giving us a pile of goodies. The 4 in 1 printer/scanner/fax copier and the data projector are ours for the year then go to our schools and they were exciting enough but the highlight for me was the ipaq handheld computer which I get to keep. I have spent the weekend playing and exploring just what it can do - about the only thng it can't do it seems is make a cup of coffee! This is going to be such a useful tool for me this year as I travel around the place. The Bubbles game is pretty good too - didn't get anywhere near Brian's high score 948 which seems pretty awesome for just a few days trying. Guess I'll just have to keep trying.

Have just begun my e-fellow year (day 3), it's all really exciting and just a little bit scary. We've been working on our research plans to clarify exactly what we are going to do and how we are going to do it. This has resulted in a lot of initial confusion as I tried to narrow my focus and keep things manageable. However there is light at the end of the tunnel and I now have my research questions clear in my mind. Once I have finalised this plan I will post it on this blog.

If you are thinking of applying for an e-fellowship I can certainly recommend it, just having the space away from the classroom to read the research and browse the web for information has been great. Getting together with the CORE team and the other e-fellows has also been wonderful and thought-provoking.