Category Archives: B. SKI

The project I chose to customize was the one on Cellular Respiration.  I would use this project to teach this concept to students in Grade 5. While the goal of WISE is to promote an atmosphere of inquiry, autonomy, and critical thinking, I found these project to be very text-heavy. My school has many EAL learners, and many would struggle to complete these tasks on their own without teacher guidance. Therefore, I added in activities at the beginning for students to complete that would give them a higher chance of succeeding on their own as they worked their way through the module. Also, I added in a reflection activity after the second activity for students to stop and reflect on their learning. Based on students reflections, teachers could either let them continue on their own, or intervene and go back and review information with small groups of students who need more support.

To start, I added in some ‘Tuning In’ activities to both activate students prior knowledge and to tune them into the topic. The first activity I added was a See/Think/Wonder. In this activity, the students will look at two macro images of plants and record what they ‘see’ in the pictures, what they ‘think’ about the pictures and any wonderings they might have. This is meant to both tune them into the topic as by starting a discussion, and the teacher can then formatively assess what language they are using and record questions they might have.

The next activity I added was a Key Word activity. In my class there are many EAL learners, so learning and reviewing any new vocabulary is essential to creating understanding before emerging into content. Here the students use the ‘Frayer Model’ to define and learn the new words, and then find out what the word translates to in their mother tongue.

Key Words:

Carbon Dioxide, Chloroplast, Glucose Photosynthesis

(still working on how I can add something like this to the WISE platform)

Both these activities are consistent with the SKI model as they will activate prior-knowledge and are a way of making students thinking visible. Furthermore, they are open-ended and inquiry in nature.

Finally, I added the video below explaining at the end of section 2 as a summary of the above materials. I added a split screen reflection for the students to fill out. The first side is for students to write what they learned from the video and how they can connect it to what they learned through the above materials. The second is the same reflection but done after discussion with others.

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.