INFO 250 Spring 2021

Project 2:

Umbrella to Question Start

A Cotaught Learning Experience Using a Knowledge Building Center, a Think Model, and Technology

Teachers and professors often strive to bring students outside of a basic textbook/lecture environment and into the world of information and technology. This opens the doors for a teacher librarian to encourage students to inquire into the "real" world.

What Does This Mean?

For Project 2, you and your partner will take a basic "bird unit" and make it an exciting learning activity that could be co-taught by teachers (professors) and teacher librarians. The lesson you create will embrace a rich information and technology environment in order to help students deeper understanding and stimulate the development of 21st century skills. Meaning, your new unit will be turned into a Knowledge Building Center (KBC) where your students can access everything online. This is to be designed as a totally online learning experience with directions at the bottom of the unit plans for teaching it either face to face or in a blended learning mix.

The theory behind this is that the MLIS student will then be equipped to develop learning experiences with actual teachers and professors, as is the requirement of Project 5. Throughout the course, each one of these experiences will get more and more complex as the various partnerships learn to construct KBCs and Design Thinking experiences together. These items will then become a part of your Digital Learning Leader portfolio.

Before You Begin

Read the textbooks, Beyond Bird Units and The Big Think. These two books have many many examples of transforming basic bird units into more advanced learning experiences. They are not formatted exactly the way you will format yours, but they contain the various elements you will include in your project.
Make sure you understand the 18 Think Models and the 9 Big Think models.
If you are in a state where this is applicable, look at the Common Core Standards. Additionally, you might look for the ESSA standards of your state for some guidance.

Project 2 - Umbrella Question Details

Link to the KBC Umbrella question Model website: https://sites.google.com/view/kbcumbrellaquestion/tutorial

This is your first experience at collaborative co-teaching, so we try to make it a bit simpler and straight forward. You are learning the "Think!" models, how to use them in a Knowledge Building Center (KBC) created by a Google Site, and how to work with a partner whom you have never met.

Once you have a partner:

Select a unit on issues, people or places. These are very common units of instruction across education and are often in bird unit form. (Example: Ancient Egypt, The Founding Fathers, Immigration, etc. ).
Note: for Fall 2020, the above idea will be transformed. During the first several workshops, you will live through a sample learning unit about Disasters using the two jigsaw models in the textbook. You will be asked to "replicate" these models with a new topic from science, social studies, or language arts but keeping the structure pretty well in tact.
Ready to write up your unit lesson plans? Go the a second Knowledge Building Center website at: https://sites.google.com/view/knowledgebuildingcenterkbcguid/lesson-plan

Next Steps

You will construct your KBC using The New Google Sites. Don't use the classic version. It will be going away one of these days. Think through the following steps:

Once you understand how to construct your KBC and have decided on a topic, you and your partner will name the unit.
Your Home page will have a hook. What is a hook? A relevant and interesting photo, video, or graphic along with a question to pull the student into your unit. (Again, refer to the Umbrella Question Model Tutorial under the Home tab).
Then, on a sub page (aka "room"), create the lesson plan section. This section is list of everything you will need to include in the plan. FOR PROJECT 2 YOU ONLY NEED TO BUILD THIS LESSON PLAN ROOM OUT! (i.e. no need to build "Tools & Tutorials" or any other rooms). note: Lesson plans as a term means a collection of individual lessons that are put together by the teacher to form a teaching unit. Such a unit may take a number of days or weeks to complete.
During a workshop, you will share the rough draft KBC with our class and the instructor for constructive comment before submission.
Thinking about the SAMR Model, employ a technology in your KBC that pushes toward the top two levels.
Build a culminating activity that combines what each small group has studied into a higher level activity and product that exhibits collaborative intelligence. Follow our disaster unit plan of having individual groups that each studied a type of disaster into a jigsawed group that is preparing a family plan to survive any type of disaster.
Include an activity that happens after the unit is over and the grades are in using one of the Models from the Big Think text.

Deliverables

A KBC via your choice of Google site. Your KBC will have a home page with an enticing hook and one additional page with a fully formed unit plan.

HAVE FUN WITH THIS - GET CREATIVE AND THINK WHAT WOULD ENGAGE YOUR STUDENTS MOST

Double Check

If two or three of you have worked on a single transformation, just one of you needs to submit it to Canvas. The instructor will send the comments back to that person and everyone will receive credit. When the leader submits, please tell me who the partners were.

Google Sites

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