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Slides from Buffy J. Hamilton.

A well written post about content curation and the benefits it can offer teachers and students especially is part of the inquiry process. Discusses how it may be used to develop information literacy skills so they can become competent at locating, evaluating, and useing information

"On 5 June 2013, the Australian Law Reform Commission released a Discussion Paper for its Copyright and the Digital Economy inquiry. The closing date for submissions is 31 July 2013."

"Science4Us is a standards-based digital science curriculum that teaches science using the 5E inquiry-based instructional model. In addition to over 350 digital games and online activities, there are tons of offline experiments and hands-on projects to keep students engaged and excited about science.  It's a great choice for teachers looking to include cross-curricular activities that connect science instruction to math and language arts. Students will also learn the importance of notetaking and observing, with their very own digital notebook."

Iinterweaving three approaches - Research-led Teaching, Inquiry-based Learning, and Research on Teaching and Learning - into one distinctive model called Research-led Learning & Teaching (RLT).

Built by teachers for teachers, use myprojectpages.com to create structured online inquiry-based learning activities for the courses you teach that enable your students to engage in meaningful learning experiences while online.

Technology, when used appropriately, can help make the history and social studies classroom a site of active learning and critical thinking and further student connections with the past. Teachers can use technology to enable students to meet people of different cultures, explore ancient and modern worlds, do authentic primary-source research, problem-solve through inquiry-based activities, and much more.

Sharon Friesen's inquiry resources

If we want to develop an understanding of the pedagogy of the subject we teach, we have to start somewhere and making sense of what seems central and often difficult to grasp by most learners, is a good place to begin our inquiry. A tendency among academic teachers is to stuff their curriculum with content, burdening themselves with the task of transmitting vast amounts of knowledge bulk and their students of absorbing and reproducing this bulk. In contrast, a focus on threshold concepts enables teachers to make refined decisions about what is fundamental to a grasp of the subject they are teaching. It is a 'less is more' approach to curriculum design.

The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment.

This post is an excerpt from the Challenge section in the book, Tuned Out: Engaging the 21st Century Learner.

She stressed the importance of collecting conflicting information before making up one's mind, of calibrating one's certainty level to the strength of the evidence, of enduring uncertainty for long stretches as an answer became clear, of correcting for one's biases.

"It doesn't seem to matter what age group or demographic that I talk to, kids (and adults) everywhere are fans of Angry Birds. As I was playing around with Angry Birds (yep I'm a fan too), I started thinking about all of the learning that could be happening. I have watched a two year old tell an older sister that "you have to pull down to go up higher". I have watched as kids master this game through trial and error. Being the teacher that I am, I started dreaming up a transdisciplinary lesson with Angry Birds as the base. I happened to be writing an inquiry lesson that has students look at inventions throughout time and thought: the catapult-that is an invention that has technology and concepts that are used even today. This is one of those inspirational moments that comes when you are drifting off to sleep and has you frantically searching for paper and pen to record as fast as the ideas come. So what did I do? I got myself out of bed and went to work sketching out a super awesome plan. Here is the embedded learning that I came up with"

Employers are expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the ability of college graduates to access, evaluate, and communicate information; to use information technology (IT) tools effectively; and to work well within groups across cultural lines. A change of instructional paradigms--from passive to active (authentic) learning strategies, such as project-based learning, problem-based learning, or inquiry-based learning--is clearly needed.

"Project-based learning is centered on the learner and affords learners the opportunity for in-depth investigations of worthy topics. The learners are more autonomous as they construct personally-meaningful artifacts that are representations of their learning. This article examines the theoretical foundations of project-based learning, particularly constructivism and constructionism, and notes the similarities and differences among implementations, including project-based science (Blulmenfeld et al., 1991), disciplined inquiry (Levstik & Barton, 2001) and WebQuests (Dodge, 1995). In addition, an anatomy of a model case will be considered using a WebQuest example developed by the author, describing seven characteristics common among the various implementations of project-based learning. Finally, practical advice and recommendations for project-based learning are discussed, including beginning slowly with the implementation, teaching students to negotiate cooperative/collaborative groups and establishing multiple forms of performance assessments."

"Genius Hour in the classroom is an approach to learning built around student curiosity, self-directed learning, and passion-based work. In traditional learning, teachers map out academic standards, and plan units and lessons based around those standards. In Genius Hour, students are in control, choosing what they study, how they study it, and what they do, produce, or create as a result. As a learning model, it promotes inquiry, research, creativity, and self-directed learning."

Despite this being a 'thinking' conference, despite us all being advocates for structured and scaffolded models of thinking, not one group had applied any thinking routines, utilised a collaborative planning protocol or talked about applying an inquiry model or design thinking cycle. It wasn't that we didn't know about them. It wasn't that we don't know how to use them. It wasn't that we don't value them. We had all the knowledge we could desire on the how to and the why of a broad set of thinking tools and anyone of these would have enhanced the process, but we did not use any of them. Why was this the case and what does this reveal about our teaching of these methods to our students?