Inquiry Based Projects

My prior experience with inquiry based projects is  the ones I did in elementary school. They weren't called inquiry based projects, but I remember doing projects where we would each choose an animal and go online and learn facts about the animal so that we could work on writing five paragraph essays. In high school, we probably also did projects that were similar to this but nothing explicitly like this.

I am learning more and more about how handy technology is. If your students do have internet access and computers, uploading your projects to a wiki would be super helpful for learning. All the projects are in one spot without wasting the time and resources on printing them all. The students can go through each page reading and learning about each others projects. Inquiry based projects can be good because you can assign a student one small thing to learn about and then assign them to read all the data collected in one spot.

I don't know what grade I will end up teaching but if I am teaching in upper elementary with children who have computer access, I would love combining wikis and IBP together to gather lots of data really fast. I think by assigning them a topic to learn about, it really gets them comfortable with collecting information off the internet. One thing I might do in my classroom is to keep it old school for the first part. I would want my students to go to the local or school library and gather the information from books. Then to grow their technology skills, I would have them type it up and correctly save it in a wiki, add a picture and add correct links to a website that might be helpful for further information.

Website Evaluation

As a teacher, it is going to be important to know how to evaluate a website so that resources that one finds are credible and up to date. There is much more that goes in to finding a website than I originally realized. I must examine the layout and animations to the information that is presented to who published and compiled the information. Questions must be asked. Who are the publishers? Are they biased? Do they have the credentials for me to trust the information on the site. One doesn't have to go through a formal checklist every time you go to a new website but being aware of the qualifications of a good website when first entering the website will really serve your classroom.

I evaluated discoveryeducation.org. There was a lot of information on the website and with the website evaluation checklist I was able to systematically process the website and examine the quality and soundness of the information. One doesn't have to go through a formal checklist every time you go to a new website but being aware of the qualifications of a good website when first entering the website will really serve your classroom. You will be presenting new websites and resources to children very frequently and because of the amount of information on the internet, one must be really careful and know what they are advising for their students.

Introduction and Expectations

Hello! My name is Kristy Myers! I am originally born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee but moved to Knoxville three years ago for college and now claim this as home! The Lord has guided my steps here and I am continually aware of the way he has provided for me in friends, community, and guidance! I am majoring in BCMB and am secretly a science geek who loves to talk about covalent bonds, neurons, and cellular respiration.

I am more passionate though about who I want to work with one day. My dream for my life is to be the best teacher that I can be to urban kids. It seems glamorous at first to go into this community as their savior and to save them from the low expectations and the lack of success, but I know that it is going to be hard every day. There are going to be a lot of cases where the kids don't succeed, where I don't see growth, or where I am disrespected. I do not do this though for the feeling that so many people in this world crave: the feeling that they have done something to change the world. I do it because the Lord has called me to give a voice to the voiceless, care for the poor, and love the orphans. I hope to show them the love of Christ the best way I can even if that is not through my words. I am excited to be in a classroom every day with students who need this love more than I know.

So in summation, technology is honestly not something that I am passionate about. Because I am going to be working in lower-income schools with families that may not have computers, I wonder how much I am going to be able to utilize this technology. I have already learned a lot of cool ways to incorporate technology into the classroom to communicate with parents such as wikis and blogs but I just hope that these skills that I learn will be able to help the students' families that I will come into contact with!