I am also hoping that this will better enable the current third grade team to go in and add any insight that they have from teaching these units last year. Third and Fourth grade teams loop, so the Units of Inquiry that I will be teaching this year were taught by this year's third grade teachers. I have found it very difficult to continue to improve these units when I only see them every other year. It is also very difficult to carve out time in our busy schedules for two grade level teams to collaborate in a "traditional" way to improve the units.
The units are not complete. I inserted information that teams worked on in the development of the planners, essential questions, student questions, summative assessments etc. Then I added specific lessons at the very bottom of the page (number 10). I Am Seeing Stars uses much of the resources from a fourth grade FOSS science kit. I am working on adding online resources and adding documents to the unit that teachers would need as they are teaching, guiding questions for journal entries for example. I also have found videos on each of the planets and downloaded those videos on to the ipod. Students will be able to pick up an ipod, look for the playlist on their planet, and view 2 or 3 short videos on that planet. This would be one of the way students will be gathering information about a planet they are studying.
A Timeline Study of History focuses on the influential people of Colorado from prehistoric times to the development of Farming and Ranching. I have been working on this chronologically so the first few lessons are very well developed, and the last few haven't been developed at all yet.
Again, I did this without any input and have been anxious to get this out there so the collaboration could begin. I believe you have to request to join the space. Click on the link below and join the process!
3 comments:
Jeff,
I am blown away! Such a cool way to use a wiki to organize the work of teachers. I have only explored the wiki a little, but it looks awesome. I wonder if other IB teachers in Colorado would join?
You should cross-post this over at Global Learners.
Joe
Wow, Jeff! You spent a lot of time and energy putting together this Wiki space! I think it will be a great resource as you are teaching each unit, and a way to collaborate with the other teachers on your team and on my team. After viewing your Wiki I now have lots of questions on how to best collaborate on the space with both teams. It makes sense for the third grade team to create and maintain a space for the third grade units.
In a perfect world both teams would also have enough time to contribute to both spaces, but I don't know how realistic that is. I could see each team adding to their units this year, and then adding to the opposite spaces the following year.
Thank you for creating this space for collaboration for our teams! I'm looking forward to talking with you and our teams more, and showing them what you created. This is just a jumping off place!
~Emily
Jeff
This is amazing!!! I can see collaboration is key and you have found a way for teachers to do just that! We sometimes forget that there is a lot going on outside of our classrooms. We need to harness it!
Tonia
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