Mid-term adjustment to inquiry project

As I make progress in my inquiry project, I need to make a few adjustments. I am still working on setting up Livebinders for different curriculum areas and as I do this I realize that I am using a version of an online pathfinder. As such, I am going to change the focus for the last part of the project from investigating online pathfinders to looking at blogging in the classroom using the platform kidblog.org. This will be for the period of Mar 5- 28. My rationale for investigating the use of blogs in the classroom is to give the students a venue to write and to also give them the experience of putting together a good blog and making good comments on their classmates' blogs. This will fit right in to the unit on digital citizenship and digital footprints that I am teaching this Grade 7 class right now. "...blogs are being used as class portals, online filing cabinets for student work, e-portfolios, collaborative space, knowledge management... students are learning to read more critically, think about that reading more analytically, and write more clearly. And, they are building relationships with peers, teachers, mentors, and professionals within the Weblog environment" (Richardson, 2010, p. 20). My ultimate plan for these blogs, after we work on setting them up, is to have these Grade 7 students use them as journals to record their thoughts during the research process for a project on Mesoamerica which we will start after Spring Break.

Another adjustment that I need to make is to change the dates for my Prezi inquiry. I will now be working on this from Mar 13 - 20. I am happy that I built a little leeway into my original plan. With these adjustments I will still be able to finish my inquiries by the due date.

Stay tuned for updates on my Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter projects. I knew that this project would not be linear, but I am feeling that I am almost to the point of juggling work on all of my projects right now. Next on the agenda is investigating digital storytelling tools, while at the same time playing with all of the other new tools I have signed up for.

I can not believe the number of  tools out there on the Web that we can use in our teaching. I am enjoying blogging about my experiences, following and now tweeting on Twitter and using my RSS feed in googlereader. I hope to be able to keep up this blog even after this course is finished as a way to document my learning of other new Web 2.0 tools. What a great way to set up a personal learning network.

Works cited:

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.