Unit 5 Reflection: Engaging Students with Web 2.0 Tools and Inquiry

     This week, I have come to see even more, the value of web 2.0 tools in my classroom as it relates to student engagement and the process skills, the abilities and understanding of inquiry and the three key findings listed below.

1.    Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.

3.  A "metacognitive" approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them (pp. 1-2)

     In order for students to learn they must be engaged and make connections to their prior knowledge.  I often tell my students to look in their brain dictionaries for vocabulary that they can link with the new facts and concepts that I’m teaching them.  When I introduce a new vocabulary word or skill, I simply write it on the board and then ask students to make any connections they can with it.  They turn and talk with their neighbor to share their ideas.  For example, I introduced contractions this week.  Students came up with similar sounding words such as construction and subtraction.  They didn’t pull out the meaning of contract but they are second graders so I wasn’t looking for that, I just wanted to get them to start a connection so we had something to build on.  Construction worked because we are constructing a new word and subtraction worked because we are subtracting letters in order to make the new word.  Now students had something to connect with and at least a temporary place in their brain dictionaries to store the new word.  I used a video from Grammar Jammar to build their prior knowledge and connect contraction with the concept that they were probably already familiar with or had seen in books.  The video plays a song and characters dance and the examples of contractions appear and move around on the screen as they go from being two words into a contraction.  The word apostrophe is introduced here as well.  Students were able to connect apostrophe with a comma but that an apostrophe is on sky line and the comma is on the grass line.  I could see that students were engaged during this lesson because they were active.  During the video they were trying to sing along and calling out connections.  “I’ve seen that word before!”  “Hey, that looks like a comma!  We learned about comma’s last week.” After the video, I asked students again to turn and talk and share their new ideas with their partner.  Now light bulbs were going off.  They had all seen contractions before they just didn’t know what they were called or the right way to build them.  The activity that I assigned the students was to copy four examples from the board: could not, do not, does not and can not and turn them into contractions on their Kidblog.  Here is their finished blog example.  

     From here I could see where the students were at with building contractions using 'not'.  They also went in and commented on each other’s blogs to help teach each other the rule of dropping the o.  In the next lesson I showed students another video from Grammar Jammar that explained how to make contractions with other endings such as is and have.  We built these types of contractions together and students identified the rules.  In the third lesson, we revisited the video and sang along so students could have a jingle to help them remember the rules when building contractions.  I then had them write two words on a sticky note and the matching contraction on another sticky note.  I collected them and ruled out any misconceptions.  One student overgeneralized the rule and wrote Barcavage is and Barcavage’s so I was able to take a quick teachable moment to get the student back on track.  I handed out the sticky notes and did a mix freeze.  The students paired up and went around the circle reading the two words and then the matching contraction.  Students then went back to their blogs and wrote what they learned about contractions.  At the end, I had a few of them share what they wrote on the Smartboard and the class gave them feedback on their writing and their ideas so the student could edit and revise.  Students now have the word contraction linked in their brain dictionaries in several places.  They already had examples of contractions filed away now they have the word connected to them and the rules are linked in with the appropriate contraction.  I always tell my students in order to learn new vocabulary you have to speak it, read it and write it over and over and over again.  Next week, I am going to have students use what they know now to understand irregularities in contractions such as making will not into won’t.   I would like them to build a presentation at the end of the week to apply their understanding.  Does anyone have suggestions for what they could use?  I was thinking maybe the Popplet app where they could do a word splash of contractions or maybe ShowMe. 

     As I continue to build upon my understanding of using inquiry based learning in my classroom I will utilize technology with student engagement in mind.  From this week’s readings and discussions, I feel more validated for the time and energy I’ve put in to making technology accessible and useable for my students.  They are learning new ways to communicate and how to be responsible in an online community.  I am excited to see how all this connects and encourages students to take ownership of their learning while mastering new concepts and building lifelong process skills. 

Unit 5: Web 2.0

   Web 2.0 technology tools are engaging because they incorporate video, music, images and artful presentations that capture student’s attention.  Teachers can use community tools to get students collaborating on projects and activities.  They can share writing, pictures, videos and take polls to enhance their learning.  Presentation tools can be used to engage students by adding music, avatars of popular figures, video, and unique artistic displays of slides to present materials.  In addition, students’ prior knowledge can be engaged by using familiar songs, images and videos so that they can make connections with their beliefs and the new information you are trying to teach them.   Web 2.0 tools can be used to elicit student’s prior understanding in many ways.  First, polls or quizzes can be given using the students’ cellphone, i-Pad, netbook or computer to find out what they already understand.  Students could respond to questions in a wiki and read each other’s responses to help identify and build students’ background knowledge. 

  Web based technology helps support the process skills of inquiry-based learning by supporting them with sharing their opinions and viewpoints on blogs and wikis.  Students are practicing technical skills and written communication skills.  Students are formulating explanations, questions and making predictions through blogs and presentations.  Students can observe, plan and investigate and analyze data through teacher made Animoto’s. 

   Web 2.0 tools can be used to assess students understanding by using interactive presentations such as Nearpod  to get instant feedback throughout the lesson through polls and quizzes.  They can also use blogs and wiki’s as a ticket out door to answer questions and explain concepts in their own words.  My students use Kidblog every day in every subject to share their findings and explain their understanding.  I also have them apply and demonstrate skills that I have taught them.  The students also use ShowMe to explain their reasoning as they work through problems on the interactive whiteboard.  The lesson can be saved and uploaded so others can view it and we can view lessons from others. 

Unit 4: Linking Curricular Goals to Inquiry

From this week’s discussions and readings, I have come to a better understanding of concepts vs. facts and investable vs. non-investable questions.  I see how facts and concepts are related and how I can create investable questions from facts to help students master concepts.  In class we focus on helping students discover facts about the world around them.  In order to do that we need to plan and help them create investable questions that can be acted on now.  Once students are able to connect facts to their lives they can then start to explore and understand concepts that connect with those facts, all of this is the process of learning.  Taking two pieces of information and forming them into one new concept.

I have had many successes and a few set backs applying these ideas in my teaching this week.  I am always thinking how can I use questioning to help my students arrive at the conclusion I want rather than just tell them the answer.  I feel like my students are more active when I put the responsibility and ownership in their court.  They are doing the work and I am coaching them.  I try to lead with their strengths and strengthen their weaknesses.  I was using these strategies in reading and understanding characters this week.  I taught students to use clues from the text and text features to gather information about the character.  Then, I tried to have them use inferences to make statements about who the characters are, what their relationships are like, what they are thinking and what they are feeling.  The students were able to use a graphic organizer to record their findings.

Also, this week we did instructional rounds for two days in our building.  We were able to visit four classrooms and record our observations just as we did with the video on the science teacher.  My focus was on student accountability.  From my observations and interviews with the students I was able to arrive at the conclusion that student accountability goes hand in hand with student ownership of their learning.  Students take ownerships when they are able to connect with the content and formulate their own questions.  In order for students to connect with the content they must understand why it is important to them in their lives.  That’s why formulating real world investable questions and investigations are so important to student learning.  Through this week’s readings, I am now better able to break down big ideas from the curriculum goals into facts and formulate meaningful, investable questions to guide my students as they investigate the answers and create new investable questions.

Unit 3: Inquiry Based Learning in the Classroom

  

It has been another amazing week in Inquiry Based Learning.  My epiphany this week was that the essential features of inquiry hold true for any classroom and for any age student.  Just as the science teacher, Arthur, was explaining in the video, The Physics of Optics, “learning is when you take something you know and something new and connect them so you know one piece of information”(2000). I am making the connection that inquiry looks and feels very much the same throughout students educational careers.  Again, the process skills that I am teaching will carry over for the rest of their lives.  I thought I had a pretty good understanding of this last week but it is even more clear to me now.  I have been trying to focus in on my intentions with process skills in my classroom and make sure I give them time to use those skills within our activities.  It can be hard not just to give them the answers especially when we are so time pressed in the classroom, but I can see a huge difference when my students “stumble” upon the answer for themselves. 

The activity that we did last week with sorting inspired me to have my students do the same with complete and incomplete sentences.  I had my students tell what they know about this on their blog and then read their peers and make comments as to how their ideas are the same and different.  Then we did several activities with building sentences in class to help the students discover the parts of the sentence.  In the beginning of the week my students thought that a complete sentence had an uppercase letter at the beginning and period at the end.  It also had to have a lot of words not just three or four.

 On Thursday, I gave students examples of 8 sentences on the board.  I asked them to type complete at the top of their blog and type the sentences underneath that were complete.  Then I had them type incomplete and type those sentences under that heading.  The students did this activity on their own and I walked around and asked them questions and helped guide them.  After they typed the sentences I asked them to use parenthesis to write a sentence after each incomplete sentence explaining why it was incomplete.  At first the students would write the other half of the sentence however they thought it should sound or some wrote it’s not complete because it doesn’t make sense.  I continued to prompt them with questions like What part is missing?  What part is included?  What are you wondering?  They then revised their statements to questions that reflected the missing part.  Where does Rylie go?  What does Dominick need?  Who is going to the park?  From their I had them revisit their complete sentences.  I asked them to write a sentence telling me how they know those sentences are complete.  Again they started out saying, I know they are complete because they make sense.  I asked them to look at the incomplete sentences and think about what parts they needed then look at the complete sentences and figure out what parts they have.  From there I started to get answers like, I know they are complete because they tell the ‘who and what they are doing’ or ‘how they are doing it’.  The sentence is a complete thought and it makes sense.  It has an uppercase at the beginning and punctuation at the end.  At the end of the lesson I had students come up and read their blogs.  I asked them to explain their thinking and reasoning for how they decided to sort the sentences. 

The class did an excellent job of explaining and justifying their new understanding of complete sentences.  In addition, they built and strengthened their technical process skills with computers such as how to set up a page to show information being sorted or bulleted.  They learned how to go back into their writing and add more or edit what they wrote.  They practiced reflecting on their thinking and using their prior knowledge to connect ideas.  I am not an expert by any means, but I am excited that some of these inquiry techniques and features are working in my lessons to make learning more meaningful to my students.