Week 3

Hook: What is Inquiry?

This week we will explore the inquiry process, how to develop inquiry questions and delve into the structure of your inquiry projects. Critically examining the process for an inquiry will help ensure understanding and clarity.

Prompting Questions:

• What is inquiry?
• How can an inquiry approach support or challenge teaching and learning about critical digital literacy? 
• What connections can you make from your own teaching/ learning experiences to the readings and explorations into inquiry?
• What is the process to follow when conducting an inquiry?
• How do you plan an inquiry project?
• Where does critical digital literacy fit into an inquiry?

 At the end of this week, you will be able to:

• describe and discuss forms of inquiry in the classroom (teacher inquiry, student inquiry) as it applies to curriculum and learning supporting critical digital literacy
• identify the process for an effective inquiry and apply it to the plan for your inquiry project
• meet some classmates using video chat software to talk about inquiry
• provide constructive and specific feedback about inquiry projects proposed by classmates

1. Critically consider Inquiry in Teaching and how digital literacies can support inquiry in the classroom:
   • View the video above. Consider how an inquiry process can be applied to your own inquiry project. How will this information shape your project design?
   • View the images in this Adobe Spark presentation and compare to your conceptualization of INQUIRY. Pause the recording and zoom to view the images presented.
     • Consider how Adobe Spark could be used to share information from an inquiry project.
   • Listen to the podcast created by one group of students from last year’s 3516 Course work and posted to Soundcloud to deepen your understanding of inquiry in teaching and learning – see embedded Soundcloud recording below.
     • Consider how Soundcloud or audio recordings could be used to share information from an inquiry.

Guided Practice

FIRST: Make connections from the readings, your teaching experiences, and your own previous involvement in inquiry projects and/or research. Consider which model or framework would best fit your teaching style. Insert up to 5 words or short phrases into our collaborative word cloud – generated in this Answer Garden – What is inquiry learning?.

• Post a response to one or more of the prompting questions in the D2L discussion forum.
• Respond to ONE post from a classmate’s within your D2L discussion group.

THIRD: JOIN and participate in a ZOOM session.

If you have not used Zoom before, please SCAN and WATCH any of the one minute video tutorials to code break, and make sense of using ZOOM for video conferencing. Even if you are familiar with Zoom, examine these using a critical teacher lens to uncover something that would impact your use of Zoom in your teaching practice.

Join and participate in ONE of the Zoom chats this week (see the sign up schedule, also posted in D2L, and pick the time that fits your schedule). This is the first of two required synchronous CHECK-IN sessions done in this course.

Independent Practice

Inquiry Project Work

Examine the infographic linked below [How to Give Awesome Feedback]. This will help you provide awesome feedback to your group members about their inquiry projects! This is shared with a Creative Commons license so remix and reuse is permitted with specific conditions. We’ll learn more about CC licensing in Week 6.

Collaborate in Google Chat with your group to share – give and get awesome feedback – about your inquiry projects. Help each other to succeed in this project work by adding feedback in some concrete and specific way.

Work on revising your inquiry question based on the awesome feedback you’ve received. For the next step of this project, you should plan out what you will do, when you plan to do it, and how you will schedule the work required to complete this inquiry project by the end of Week 7. Be as specific as possible to ensure that you hold yourself accountable for this work.

Wrap Up

Check the Grade Grid to ensure you have completed each of the elements for this week.

Review and curate any of the resources from this course website for your future teaching practice.

Supplemental Resources

• What is Inquiry-Based Learning? video created by John Spencer, (2017, December), [4:35]
• 6 Questions Students Can Use to Guide Their Inquiry-Based Learning
• The Digital Thinking Project: iWonder Questions – personalizing inquiry learning
• Science Teachers of Ontario (STAO web site) – Inquiry videos. This is a series of four videos that explore the use of inquiry in teaching and learning (French versions of these videos are also available).