I want to share a few items that folks might find interesting as I catch up with my blogging. As we are about to travel for the next two weeks in Morocco, I will be posting about living and traveling in this fascinating country.
SOS Podcast: Jeff and I enjoyed a wonderful conversation with Justin Medved in episode 29 of the SOS podcast. Our essential question was, “How can the IB curriculum be shifted?”. We also discussed the ins and outs of international school recruiting in episode 30. If you are interested in becoming an international educator, do check out the show notes for the two articles I list in the Links of the Week.
IB History: I continue to work to find ways to shift my IB history class more towards inquiry and constructivist learning. I tried a semi-WebQuest for the unit on Germany and pulled back a bit on the latest unit on WWII. The semi-WebQuest had some components of a normal WQ, but I did not have the students take on roles, and they had a choice for their assessment. They could take the standard IB essay test or do a more WQ-style application project. As so few students took on the application project, I made the unit on WWII more of a standard research project. I use the term “Learning Pursuit” when I have the students do WebQuest-style online research but are not required to do all the aspects of a WQ, especially when creatively using their new understanding in a real-world application.
Here are links to these two units:
Germany Learning Pursuit
World War II Learning Pursuit
ICE Model of Instruction: Our school director, Mark Lee, gave an excellent presentation last week on the ICE instructional model. One of the ways I like to use inquiry to make connections to extend student learning is through mind maps. My favorite collaborative tool is MindMeister. While now, one is limited to only three maps for a free account, my students can export their work and stay below the limit. Here is an excellent example by Hala, one of my IB students, on the Weimar Republic, where she created a mind map to research to make connections in her learning to extend the learning into new understanding. Hala’s map is so vast you will need to zoom out to see all of it and then scroll to see all the sections.