In grade 8, students study a variety information about water. We live in Calgary and although we have some pretty great rivers, it is a tricky time of year to spend too much time in the water, or even outside for extended periods of time. So, this year I'm going to try to have students generate their own understanding of the concepts through blogging.
We started last week by looking at a basic 3 tiered version of Bloom's taxonomy which included: Remembering, Understanding and Applying. Students then went through the curriculum and listed everything that they needed to learn. We then worked as a whole class to find logical clusters of topics. Groups were assigned to take a topic and generate 50 questions relating to that area of the water unit (there was some variation in the classes, but in general there were topics like: frozen water, oceans, lakes and rivers, human impact, wildlife, water movement etc). When the groups had 50 questions, they went through the questions and determined which were 'remembering' type questions, which were 'understanding' type questions and which were 'application' type questions.
Answering the 'Remembering' Questions
The next step is to get students answering these questions in an 'Ask Jeeves' type response. The goal is not to just get answers to the questions, but rather to make it clear and interesting for people to come and read the answers. For this portion of the project, we are going to start with 'remembering' questions and students are going to each answer one question on their own from each unit. They can find movies on the internet, do a lab themselves and take pictures, they can explain, describe etc, but obviously they can not just copy and paste something from the internet. Each student will write a blog with appropriate tabs so that others can later access their information. These blogs will be attached to my blog for ease of sharing information.
Answering the 'Understanding' Questions
Once all the 'remembering' questions have been addressed by the class, small groups of students will start to tackle the 'understanding' questions. The goal here will be to only use information posted on our communal blog site. If students can not find what they are looking for on our blog, they will write out the question missing and add it to the bank of information. Again, the goal will be for each group to address one 'understanding' question from each of the main topics.
Answering the 'Applying' Questions
The goal is to follow a similar strategy for these questions as well, but I am curious to see how these sections go and talk to the students and design something for this section that will work for them. So, I'll leave this portion open at the moment.
It should be interesting....wish us luck!!
Sounds like a neat project. I really like the blooms tiering. What are you using for blogs? How will they be attached to your blog? Have you considered kidblog.org. I'm going to try it out this quarter.
ReplyDeleteI added all the students to the blog by making them authors in the permissions section of blogger. We are all therefore posting on the same blog. It has worked really well so far.
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