How Can Teachers Use Web Tools For Inquiry Based Learning?

“Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand”, A Chinese proverb. So, involving in a topic is an efficient way of improving learning outcome. If you involve in a topic, you will get to know the whole scenario. Involving is 

the essence of inquiry based learning. Inquiry based learningdescribes approaches to learning that are based on the investigation of questions, scenarios or problems – often assisted by afacilitator. Inquirers will understand and study issues and questions to improve their knowledge or solutions. Inquiry-based learning includes Problem-based learning, and is used in small scale investigations and projects, as well as research.

Inquiry based learning will be much more beneficial for students, because involvement in learning results in improvement of possessing skills and attitudes that permit you to seek resolutions to questions and issues while you build your  new knowledge. There are many web tools that support inquiry based learning which teachers can use effectively to make all the students involve in the interaction. Here are some of those web tools.

Socrative:

Socrative is a community of students, educators, entrepreneurs, and engineers passionate about improving education. It is ideal for interaction within classroom. Once you signed up, you will see 2 categories here; single question activities & quiz based activities. Teachers can ask questions in the moment via Single Question Activities, or you can design a quiz beforehand and run it during class. Either way, you’ll be able to visualize and measure student understanding in real time. Students can respond from laptops, tablets, smart phones and other handheld devices. Students have to click on the student login. Teacher should tell the room number of his mail id that displayed on teacher’s dashboard after logged in. Here teacher can ask true/false questions, multiple choice questions and short answer questions too. This interactive platform makes all students involve because of exciting design layout. Try in your classroom and make students engaged to inquiry based learning.

Poll Everywhere:

Poll Everywhere is a very useful web tool for teachers as well as students in order to increase the involvement and interaction. Teachers can create a free classroom response system with your students; you can conduct many surveys (you can have up to 32 students respond to each survey that you create) here. Once you signed up, you will find an option my polls, after clicking on that you can create a new poll, and there will be several types of polls like “Multiple Choice Poll”, “Free Text Poll” and “Goal Poll”. Multiple choice polls will be obvious to what it is, a free text poll allows students to text for your short answer questions. Once after you created a question, you will see a message on the top. It will be providing you a number & pre text that students have to enter before their message. This is how you can run the questions, quizzes and surveys. There will be some advanced options also to make the survey effective. So, take a look at this awesome web tool.

These are the two key web tools for implementing IBL-Information Based Learning. And there are more such tools related to IBL in its several phases. Let’s see those phases and respective web tools.

Inquiry based learning is an active learning process, based on recognizing respective questions to research so that the student can improve knowledge about or create solutions to issues and problems. It’s of the following phases.

Activating Prior Knowledge:

Engaging students in a conversation about what they already know.

Providing resources to find the information about the topic:

Students need to know something about the topic. There are many web tools that will provide articles, videos, and e books for students to get the background information.

Web tools: Youtube, Pics4Learning, SlimeKids and etc.

Gathering, Selecting, Organizing:

There is plenty of information in the web, but the students learn to select & collect the most relevant information about the topic.

Web tool: Diigo, Lino, Evernote  and many.

Creating & Sharing the Presentation:

There are some awesome web tools for creating and sharing the contents.

Web tools: Animoto, Audacity, Blogger and many.

Evaluate Assessing:

For collaborating and sharing contents, there must be a safe web platform needed.

Web tool: Edmodo, Voice Thread and many.

These are processes and respective web tools of IBL. Do implement this very active learning process and get enormous increase in the learning outcomes. Share more such web tools related to IBL in the comment box.