GID and Google Classroom

Howdy again from the Lone Star State!  My name is Tara Rollins and this is my second year to post to the blog.  You can find my previous entries in October 2016 (last three entries) https://52guidedinquiry.edublogs.org/2016/10/.

It has been an interesting year in Houston.  We started school this year on the day of the solar eclipse.  The next week, we were inundated with 51 inches of rain during Hurricane Harvey.  We were out of school for over a week and many areas of town are still in recovery mode.  Needless to say the year has been a little bit hectic.  However, we have lots of good inquiry projects ongoing and in the planning stages!

When I last spoke to you, I mentioned the time constraint that many of us face in continuing a unit of inquiry.  Over the summer, a collaborative effort was made to begin to place some units of inquiry into Google Classroom.  These classrooms can be shared with teachers and/or students and can be used in technology centers throughout the units in groups, pairs, or alone.

Of course units have to be flexible, so needless to say the “Open” we planned in July for the 2nd grade Natural Disasters Inquiry needed to be changed from the picture below due to our experiences during Hurricane Harvey in August.  What a difference a month can make in planning and implementing GID!  However, having it on our Google Classroom platform made it as simple as changing a picture/URL.

I do not mean to imply that all of our inquiry is done in centers, nor is it all completed or implemented through technology.  The Google Classroom option is merely one tool that I have added this year to encourage teachers and students to push on with inquiry even when the librarian is not able to co-teach each lesson.  It also is a great way to share what’s going on with parents (although that has not been implemented as of yet at my campus).

Open for Inquiry into Natural Disasters