Preparing Students for a World of Possibilities

 

How can teachers open doors to the world for their students through the use of inquiry based internet projects?  As Donald J. Leu Jr. stated in his article, Preparing Students for the 21st Century, "The Internet is this generation's defining technology for literacy and learning."  As the need for technology literacy rapidly increases, teachers are left with the responsibility to put the pieces together and use the internet as a literacy tool, while meeting the curriculum standards in the classroom today.

It takes hard work and creativity to design meaningful projects that allow students to conduct research and use the internet as a platform to display their work and dialogue with a potentially worldwide audience.  As Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, and Cammack (2004) defined, "These new literacies allow us to use the Internet and other ICTs to identify important questions, locate information, critically evaluate the usefulness of that information, synthesize information to answer those questions, and then communicate the answers to others."

In the article How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms, Purcel, Heaps, Buchanan, and Friedrich (2013) explained that one of the primary challenges that teachers face in incorporating technology is time constraints.  Luckily, many outstanding teachers have made the job of designing such meaningful projects much less overwhelming.  Just as our students must learn how to effectively use the resources available on the internet, teachers must develop methods for seeking out well designed inquiry based projects.  The goal of this blog is to provide access to resources and ideas that other teachers can easily adapt to fit the needs of their classrooms. 

Last week, I made my first attempt at incorporating an Internet Inquiry project into my second grade classroom.  Lincoln Public Schools has a resource available to K-5 teachers called Wonders LibGuides.  Within each LibGuide, there are step by step research and inquiry instructions, digital resources, and a self-evaluation for students, all centered around the essential question for the week connected to the Wonders curriculum.  I found that the LibGuides were easy to navigate for my students and provided a wealth of high quality resources for my students.

Using the 2nd Grade LibGuides, I had my students research Unit 4 Week 2 Essential Question: How does the Earth Change?  Students chose to research earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, or hurricanes, and went through the steps on the left to complete their research.  They used the resources in the middle column and supplemental nonfiction books from our school library. I had my students complete their research with 1 or 2 partners during their workstations. 

Some of the things that went well with this project were that my students had no issues getting to the page and using the digital resources.  They were highly engaged in the research and enjoyed using the internet to learn more about their topic.  Students also had the opportunity to use multimodal resources including videos, nonfiction books, search engines, and content related websites. 

I definitely plan to try LibGuides research again in the future.  It will be important to carefully model each step of the research before students complete it independently, so students understand how to use their graphic organizers.  In addition, I will choose to do it on a week where there is better laptop availability, so students have ample time to complete their research.  As my students become more familiar with creating videos on the iPad, I would love their final LibGuides project to be a creation using Videolicious, Lego Movie, Tellagami, Pic Collage, or Chatterkid. These products could easily be shared with parents or other collaborators and give my students an authentic audience for their work.  What are your ideas for using LibGuides as an Internet Inquiry project in your classroom?