Reflections About io Project Design

Approximately a year and a half ago, a colleague of mine and I decided to attend a two day Galileo workshop held in Golden Hills. After finally choosing a topic and then working on it for much of that year, we implemented our Journeys project and it was a huge success!

Filled with this knowledge, and inspired by the enthusiasm and excellent quality of student work, we decided to design an inquiry for Sports Heroes.

We started to develop this inquiry with the following in mind: that the inquiry satisfy the language arts curricular goals, the C level goals of the ICT curriculum and familiarized students with their new junior high school library. And, of course, it had to be interesting enough that all of the grade seven students would want to do it.

When we first logged into io, the process seemed to be cumbersome and time-consuming. It seemed like there were too many stages to go through and that the io process was very slow. However, just like with the initial planning stages in all Galileo designed projects, there was a method to the madness.

It takes time to develop a succinct, worthwhile task, one that has both educational merit and one that will interest students. As this project was developing, we kept coming back to “what is it that is most worthwhile or valuable to learn about this topic?” Once that was determined, the rest of the planning was a breeze.

Having the rubric done before the project was educationally sound. It is not something that I have always done. The rubrics certainly helped guide the students’ work and they were worth it, even though they caused us a lot of grief trying to get the right words into the right boxes. With this first project, there were some glitches and certainly this is a time-consuming process. However, the benefits certainly outweighed the negatives, especially once I taught the inquiry.

Reflections About the Student Work

The quality of the students’ work turned out to be surprisingly good.

The group collaboration was the part that I found was the most useful in driving this project forward. Each group had to decide on the magazine format, font size and style, picture layout, headline size, etc. Then we met two more times as a group to ensure that everyone was meeting the set criteria and that the tasks were indeed being completed. The collaboration and group meetings really helped, encouraged and, in some cases, even forced students to finish the project. The group Editorial Board is an essential element of this project. Students had the choice of topic, the choice of which role to take on the Editorial Board, and they had input/influence on the way the magazine was written.

I would definitely do this project again. Next time I would give the students a little less time on the research and a little more time on writing and putting together the magazine. Overall, about 3-4 weeks of continuous class time is needed.

Working with this project allowed me to help any students who were having trouble with the material or the technology, and the students at the grade 7 level learned a great amount about creating a magazine.