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.