Researching

Today I worked with Stephanie at DNI. The topic they are studying is weather. She did some google searches and found a weather forum which had information she has been looking for. Best of all her class will be able to use the forum to post questions to a whole network of weather experts and enthusiasts. The weather forum connects to other useful sites like the Met Service site.

Stephanie has just had a projector put into her classroom and has started using it to share videos with her class. We also looked at some sites she might use for Maths and Science, the BBC Bitesize activities and the NZ Maths site (particularly the digital objects). We looked at teacher tube, as another resource to use video in the class. The teacher tube videos are ideal as they are short and because they have been made by teachers the learning is explicit.

Stephanie had lots of ideas about what to focus on for her action research. We spent some time looking at a few search engines for children rather than exclusively using google. As we looked also at getting information from experts and the LEARNZ site, Stephanie is sort of thinking about researching skills and different ways and resources to use for finding information for her topics throughout the year.
I'm looking forward to seeing what she decides.