EED 509 Module 2 Inquiry Based Learning Model Tool Review

The Inquiry model of instructional design allows our students to build their own knowledge and understanding through engaging, student-led activities. Teachers give students the opportunity to explore, question, explain, and extend their world and education into new places. For more on the Inquiry model of instructional design, see my Smore presentation: The Inquiry Model: A Process-Oriented Instructional Model.

Documentation is an important aspect of inquiry-based learning because our students need to be able to express their findings in a way that is easily communicable to others. This not only will increase their understanding of the content because it requires explanation but it also allows them to experience meaningful communication of ideas that is critical in our society. 

Educreations is a digital tool used to capture, share, and replay information. This program is an app for Apple devices and requires little technological knowledge in order to use. The basic version of the app is free and allows the user to:

• Take or upload pictures and videos
• Annotate using various colors, texts, and clipart
• Record voices
• Share to various forms of media such as emails or social media accounts

Educreations provides an easy and meaningful way for students to document their learning during an inquiry-based lesson. For example, in a lesson that poses the question, "How does lava move through a volcano?" students could explore and investigate the question using texts and videos, form a hypothesis based on their findings during exploration, then use the Educreations app to explain their hypothesis, such as the image above. The students could then test their hypotheses and create another page on their current educreations document to explain their conclusion based on the results of the experiment. 

Similar to the project-based instructional design model, inquiry-based learning often requires rubrics for meaningful assessments. Rubrics provide both the students and teachers a visual, well-organized format of clear guidelines and expectations. Unfortunately, rubrics are time-consuming and complicated to create using an average document program like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Rubistar is a free website that allows teachers to find rubrics previously created for various grade levels and content areas or create their own. Teachers have the option of creating their rubric based on similar ones for the content area, with differing levels of expectations, and different categories for consideration. The image on the right is an example of a rubric created for an Author study biography. It has four levels of expectations from 4 being the highest level and 1 being the lowest. It also includes four different categories for consideration for students to follow when creating their biographies. Rubistar does require a basic understanding of saving and printing files as well as a comfortability in navigating a website. The rubrics are simple enough to create as long as the user can follow the prompts and understand the content language such as category and text boxes.