A word to the WISE

I chose to customize ‘Global Climate Change and Ozone’ from the WISE library. I chose this particular project because I have a few students who are covering this topic in their classes and are having some trouble understanding climate change. These students are designated with learning disabilities and they process information at a slower pace so I had them in mind when I was going through this. First, I customized the first lesson to use a KWL (Know, Wonder, Learn) chart to ask:

1.What do you know about climate change?

2.What do you wonder about?

3.What do you want to learn about?

The reason that I implemented this is because I would want to find out what my students know before I began so I could tailor the to their needs and what they want to learn. I also customized the project to take out the assessment items. These particular students have a lot to process and having assessments would give them anxiety. I would assess in a way that my students would be comfortable and I would give them a choice in how they want to tell me what they have learned.

I also customized it to show a bill Nye video. I found that this video was thorough and who doesn’t love bill Nye! https://www.climaterealityproject.org/video/climate-101-bill-nye. I show Bill Nye videos to my students quite a bit and my students love it. I would show this once I knew where my students were in terms of their knowledge and learning. I scaffold in my teaching and I try to get my students to reflect on their learning quite a bit because I want them to make connections and I have found that “the process of reflection on ideas, we suggest, motivates students to revisit, test and, reformulate the links and connections among their ideas leading to more coherent, integrated understanding.” (Davis, 2000). It’s hard to customize the rest of the project as I could only do this once I knew where my students were at in terms of their learning. But regardless of this, I would customize the project so that reflection is integrated into each lesson so my learners can ask questions and link what they know to new information and build on their knowledge. I would also customize this project to integrate collaborative work (SKI framework) in each lesson. With my set of learners, it would take extra time to complete one lesson but as long as they are able to comprehend ideas and information, that is all that matters. I would ensure that with collaborative work, a stronger student was with a struggling student so that “students learn from one another” (Slotta & Linn, 2003). I would also embed the rest of the SKI framework into each lesson as these are the four pillars of pedagogical principles. For the learners that I work with, it is imperative that thinking is visible for all learners so they can see how “links and connections are made” (Slotta & Linn, 2003). This is critical because if they cannot see how connections are made in science, there is no point in moving on to the next lesson as this will confuse them and hinder their learning. I would use interactive diagrams and videos to help these would provide a mode of interaction with technology that would engage learners and transfer information.

WISE was developed so that learners could develop inquiry-based science projects in order to enhance learning and collaboration in the science classroom and to also support educators with technology platforms with confidence as “they engaged in a depth-of-coverage approach to learning science topics” (Slotta & Linn, 2003). Although I think WISE is a fantastic tool for both educators and students, it is not suitable for all learners without customizing the lesson. There is nothing wrong with that but it is important that educators use the customizing tool to tailor the lesson to their students especially those students who struggle with subjects such as science.

For one of our e-folio questions, we had to answer ‘What about WISE would you customize’?

My answer: I would customize WISE so that all learners, including ELL and designated learners would be able to use WISE in a way that engaged and helped them to learn. I know that WISE uses many different languages which is great but it does not use all the languages that exist so it would be difficult for those learners to be able to use such a great platform for learning. I would also customize it to integrate other subjects besides science like social studies, math, and physical education.

I think it is great that WISE has the option to customize the lesson so that the classroom teacher can make those differentiations for students but it would also be great if WISE had specific lessons for designated learners.