For class this week we talked about the documentary “Most Likely to Succeed” about a charter school in the United States that was using an inquiry based structure to allow students to learn soft skills like teamwork, adaptability and leadership. The part that I found the most interesting was near the end when they were giving statistics about the success of the school. They mention that, in all honesty, they don’t really know how successful that style of learning was going to be in the long term. The vast majority of students from this particular school were going on to pursue a higher education beyond high school and were being accepted into universities, but there was simply not enough data to be able to tell whether students would excel in a standard higher education system. I believe that it was my EDCI 780 seminar leader, Kim, who said that learning design is a pendulum. This charter school is probably at one extreme end of that swing and our standard, test based school system is at the other and what we truly need is to be able to find a middle ground that works. The pace of the world is picking up and, as people who lived through things like the digital revolution, I hope that we can recognize that and keep up. I believe that there is a possibility that those of us who aren’t able to follow the swing of that pendulum are destined to be left behind.
On a lighter note, and expanding on evolving methods of teaching and learning, I was introduced to the program called Twine. Twine is an open source tool to help users create branching, non-linear stories without necessarily needing to learn the in depth language of HTML coding. Once you have the basics down, there is the option to add to your stories with images, CSS and so much more that I have only just begun to explore. Rich McCue, our instructor for this demonstration shared a presentation that his daughter made that really helped me see this program as a tool that can be used quite effectively in the classroom.
Overall, I think that I have gained a little more insight into potential benefits of inquiry based learning design and I have been educated in some of its potential flaws. With Twine, I feel I have gained another tool in my ever growing tool belt and I have some great examples for how to use this tool to better develop a space for project based learning in the future. I have linked the story I made with Twine at the bottom of this post so check it out if that’s something you might be interested in!
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