I’ve been playing around trying to find the right format to guide our seniors through their semester-long culminating research experience. My old research pathfinder template just didn’t model the experience exactly as I liked. It offered no opportunity for comments or collaboration or easy editing and project management. So I moved it to blog format and hope that students will use it to plan, log, and reflect on their own research journeys: http://researchlogtemplate.edublogs.org.
I also started playing with wikipathfinders. Planetpathfinder.wikispaces.org and elementpathfinder.wikispaces.org are in skeletal form right now. I need to annotate them and add much more content. Please feel free to edit these wiki style. (I am hoping students will join in too.) Write me if you’d like the password!
I welcome your suggestions.
2 responses so far ↓
Joyce,
This is an incredible way to focus the research process for high school students. I’m an elementary librarian and just finished the academy in AK with Alice. I’m anxious to try her Flip it approach with my 5th graders. How much do you think I should expect out of kids at this level? I teach them how to use the databases, pathfinders I post on the webpage and take notes, but unfortunately most of my staff just can’t get past the “bird” report.
Any ideas….
Joyce,
Excellent idea! Last semester, I thought about (but didn’t get a chance to actually do it) creating social bookmarking with delicious for an assignment. I am not 100% how to make it all work, but I do like the opportunities with the wikis such as your examples. Maybe I am old school thinking - but I wonder if it drives students away from the online databases (proquest, opposing viewpoints, etc.) and students will only include the “junky” sites? I want so badly for the students to use the databases that I often forget about the rest of the web.
Or maybe this will be another avenue to draw students toward the databases… I guess we will never know until we try……
Thanks for the ideas!
-Becca