For this discussion I chose to edit the WISE project, Designing a Detergent to Clean Marine Pollution. I chose this project because it is a great challenge and inquiry based science activity and it has a lot of environmental information related to oil spill dangers. The content I edited or rather added to the lesson was a section relating to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Project. This Northern Gateway Project was of particular interest where I taught last year since I was teaching on an island south of Prince Rupert that would be directly impacted by the proposed project. The science taught in the lesson is rich in chemistry and talks about covalent bonds and intermolecular attractions. It explains why oil and water don’t mix and how detergents work. It also teaches students to write a mock, or if they wished, a real proposal to the NOAA for thier own detergent design.
I felt the WISE Project was really well developed and did not want to change or delete too much of the information. What I did want to do is add some content related to Northern Gateway to make the content more relevant to those living in BC or elsewhere in Canada. This is a great way to utilize someone else’s content and make it fit the needs of your students. In the SKI framework, learners are viewed as adding to their repertoire of ideas and reorganizing their knowledge web about science. Students sort out their ideas as a result of instruction, experience, observation, and reflection (Linn & Hsi, 2000). I felt that the particular Chemistry lesson relating to cleaning oil spills contained a vast amount of instruction that could connect the science to personally relevant problems and prior knowledge.
WISE is a great utilization of education technology for teachers and students. It offers a personalized learning management system(LMS) for the teacher that is super easy to learn but more importantly as more teachers use it to post and generate content it creates a repository of lessons that any teacher can access, use, edit, and create for use in their own classroom. In this way WISE not only applies the SKI model for students interacting with science lessons but it applies the SKI model for teachers learning new practices and sharing and generating lessons and content.
Keith
http://wise.berkeley.edu/preview.html?projectId=5914