Inquiry Question: What are the Water Issues facing the World Today?

Exploring the Issues Using Collaboration

In Order to foster Collaboration, students must learn to work together. One way to do this is to build a Thinking Classroom using Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces (Whiteboards in my case).

There is a whole method to the madness when you are building a thinking classroom (Teachers: the Thinking Classrooms link is a wonderful place to get started and I highly recommend doing PD with Peter Liljehall if you ever have the chance!)

In visibly random groups, we examined a water issue and then made a graphic organizer to help summarize our findings. Before I let the students explore their own article, we first had to model the practice by all using the same article. By using the whiteboards, I was able to quickly see who needed help and which groups needed a challenge. Below is an example of how I captured student learning using video.

Leveraging Technology

ONE SPREADSHEET=LOTS OF COLLABORATION: After we had some practice all doing the same article, students were able to search their own article and summarize it using a single google spreadsheet that they were all given access to edit. After a few hiccups with this process, all three of my classes had access to a large database of several different water issues.

All of this, and other resources we used were housed in Hapara Workspace This was a good first step in understanding what the water issues were. Students then had to explore the other students summaries. This inquiry practice directed our next steps in the learning process.