Week 5 Inquiry Based Learning Reflection

Create a blog entry that describes how your thoughts about inquiry-based learning have developed over the past few weeks. What new insights have you developed? Has anything changed? Are there any "burning questions" that you feel need to be answered?

I have to say I have grown a ton the past few weeks.  I thought I had a handle on Inquiry-Based Learning.  When I got to week 4, I realized I was wrong.  Week 4 was probably the most frustrating and challenging weeks in this class, if not in the program so far. At first glance, the assignments seemed pretty easy.  Identify concepts and facts.  Seems simple! WRONG! Some of them were easier than others, but I was constantly second guessing myself and the more I thought about it, the more frustrating I got.  I ended up going with my gut.  As I started to read everyone's responses, I realized that it really did have to do with people's perspective and understanding of the content.  What might be a fact to someone, might be a concept to other people. The grade level of the student might also be important. Once I got this, the unit was a little easier.  Non-investigatable and investigatable questions still were a little confusing and I hard time with my English Unit at first.  After a bit of thought, I just went with what I was thinking and it turned out I did just fine :)  Prior to this unit, I had no clue that there were non-investigatable and investigatable questions.  I am glad I know now and I plan to adjust my units at school. Inquiry based learning is a lot more complex then just asking quesitons.

Web 2.0 websites are not new to me.  I thank the Web 2.0 class and the rest of this masters for that.  I am toward the end of the degree and I am thankful for the experience I have had.  I enjoyed seeing where the websites came into inquiry-based learning. There are a ton of valuable Web 2.0 websites that can be used by students in their investigations of questions. I enjoyed learning about new websites like 280slides.com and revisiting old favorites like prezi, slideshare, and animoto.

There really isn't any burning questions that I still have.  I just look forward to discovering what is next in inquiry based learning.