Teaching As Inquiry Plan

Teaching As Inquiry Plan

Teacher: Esther Burrows School: Waipara Date: September 20th 2010

Goal 1: Increase capability of teachers and principals to improve students’ learning and achievement through e-learning. (Highlight one or two bullets)

Create a supportive learning environment
Teachers provide opportunities for students to:
· Be included in all lessons at their level as appropriate to their individual needs
· Celebrate their learning by displaying a range of their work
· Interact positively with other students
· Interact positively with the teacher
Facilitate shared learning
Teachers provide opportunities for students to:
· Take part in discussions to reach understanding
· Share and explain their opinions/ideas
· Question and challenge others appropriately
· Work cooperatively to achieve group goals
Encourage reflective thought and action
Teachers provide opportunities for students to:
· Discuss how well they have worked
· Identify what they should do differently in the future to get better
· Reflect on their goals to guide their action
· Use thinking tools to help them learn
Enhance the relevance of new learning
Teachers provide opportunities for students to:
· Help decide the learning intentions and success criteria
· Know what they are learning and why
· Help decide what they are learning about
· Identify their next learning step using the success criteria
Make connections to prior learning and experience
Teachers provide opportunities for students to:
· Share what they have learnt with others
· Learn through authentic, real life tasks and experiences
· Build on what they already know
· Relate learning to their everyday lives

Research Questions:

· What strategies will I use to help my students to build on their prior learning with ICT so that they can help each other to develop new skills?

§ Facilitate shared sessions with the projector introducing the ‘One Page Wonder’.

§ Get the children to share their skills in pairs.

§ Have the children run some of the teaching sessions using Keynote (ICT leaders).

§ Have student ‘computer monitors’ that are available to other students in the class and can help with problems or demonstrate skills.

· How will I gather evidence to show increased opportunities for students to be aware of the learning intentions and success criteria in my activity?

§ Take photographs of the success criteria brainstormed as a class.

§ After viewing the One Page Wonder, ask the children what they like about their presentation. How successful do they think they are? (i.e. did they meet aspects of the original success criteria)

Goal 2: Integrate ICT into the NZ Curriculum (Highlight one bullet)

Integrate ICT
Teachers provide opportunities for students to:
· Make informed decisions about when to use ICT for learning
· Use a range of ICTs for communication and collaboration
· Use a range of ICTs for critical thinking and researching
· Use a range of ICTs for creativity

Learning Area: Social Science

Concept: Disasters

Strand: Understand that events have causes and effects.

Context: Researching, sorting and presenting information based on a NZ natural disaster.

Research Questions:

· What do I need to consider when making informed decisions about when to use ICT during a teaching and learning sequence?

o Class focus – What are the needs of the students.

§ Each child in the class will begin to develop skills using Keynote.

§ In pairs children can explore Keynote applications and create a One Page Wonder. This is a form of communicating their research findings and is an appropriate learning experience that can integrate ICT.

o The students will present their One Page Wonder to Room One and Two.

Whole class activity using laptop and data projector

§ Each peer will present their One Page Wonder based on a NZ disaster to the class. They will need to speak to the page.

§ Children to reflect on the clarity of timing of the pages build ins and outs and the success of their presentation visually.

· How will I gather evidence to show informed decision making about ICT in my teaching practice?

§ I will include details of integrated unit planning combining ICT and Social Science.

§ I will include snap shots of the children’s One Page Wonders.

§ We will have Keynote presentations to share with fellow class members.

Goal 3: Strengthen professional learning communities and increase collaboration within and across schools.

Research Question:

· How will I share the results of my inquiry with my school and cluster colleagues?

§ I am going to share my findings with staff.

§ When we meet as a whole cluster, I will bring along a copy of the Keynote presentations and photos of our brainstormed success criteria.

· What happened as a result of my actions? (Based on the evidence I gathered)

Sharing Learning Intentions

When introducing the new learning the WALT is displayed and the children are asked to give ideas about communicating ideas to others.

Teacher questions posed:

§ What makes communication effective?

§ What are some of the most common ways of communicating to each other?

§ Can you think of some ways to communicate researched information to others using ICT?

§ Why is ICT (Keynote) an appropriate form of communication for this topic?

Students had plenty of good ideas for these questions.

Some student responses included:

“Communication is effective when you speak clearly and stick to the main point you have to say”.

“We communicate by speaking and writing, usually doing something like a poster”.

“You can use computers to type a story”.

“You can put things on the school wiki, on the internet for parents to see”.

Brainstorming Success Criteria

Working with the whole class, I explained that we were going to create a One Page Wonder using Keynote. The children will be researching, sorting and presenting information based on a NZ disaster as the Scocial Science topic for the term is ‘Disasters’.

I displayed the WALT for the activity on the whiteboard – “We are learning to communicate to an audience using a One Page Wonder”. We then had a discussion about the success criteria for this learning intention and I recorded the children’s ideas on the whiteboard, they noted these down in their topic books so they could refer to them during the creation of the presentation.

Using my laptop connected to the data projector, we opened Keynote and worked through the process of inserting photos, writing text, including headings. We looked at the ‘inspector’ function in great detail. The children were reminded about the success criteria during this process as we looked at font size, colour and text types.

Once they had been introduce to Keynote they then worked in pairs to create their own One Page Wonder on the laptops. They were encouraged to build in the text using inspector. Student computer monitors who were competent with the programme became expert helpers to assist others.

The final products were shared back to two classes who had both completed One Page Wonders and feedback/feed forward was offered to the pairs and the success criteria was discussed again.

Some quotes from the children:

“It was hard to get the timing right when the words flew in”

“The background picture looks really cool”

“I liked playing with the inspector function, you could make it really fancy and professional”

Most children had used PowerPoint, but this was the first time that they had tried Keynote. It was very successful, all the children benefited from having a success criteria to refer back to.

What are my next steps for teaching and learning?

Keep looking for opportunities to use ICT in my planning and integrating it into all curriculum areas.

Continue to build student leaders that can teach, assist and lead their own learning for ICT.

Continue to display the learning intentions and involve the students in establishing the success criteria.