I’d like to reflect on a rather a concept I’ve recently learned in this semester, that is an inquiry based approach to learning. This inquiry process has been talked about extensively during our semester including during ED336. Learning through inquiry looks like following a question to its answer while learning the tools needed along the way. An example might be “what does an effective teacher do?”, the answer to this question would be incredibly relevant to a student teacher. In terms of a the skills I would need in order to answer that question: I would have to learn how to research, where to look. Inquiry centers around finding sources of knowledge, once students are able to find where necessary concepts/data are kept in order to understanding their question they can begin to synthesize their information. This process often involves technology as the first step: “try a google search and see what is out there” might be something I would say to a student’s inquiry. They may immediately find an answer in which their inquiry process stops there, but for more complicated questions, they may have to read and compare articles from different sources. Learned skills may be critical to answering a question like “can I build a computer scheduling program that I can use at my place of work, in which students would not only have to research but practice skills like coding. The major benefit I could see in including inquiry within the learning space is that students have some ownership of their work, that is they chose more or less what they wanted to find out. I will have to find out from personal experience how much more effort and learning students get from having control over their learning but from professors and teachers (informed by research) that this is important as students tend to learn more. I would be hard pressed to find an inquiry question that doesn’t involve the use of technology somewhere along the line, as our immediate go to is a search engine, or databases (like pubmed) accessed through a search engine. Often the answers to inquiry questions may be technology related, “What is the most optimal way to learn a language”, the answer might be with a program that automates a distributed learning approach, such as Anki, these programs or Aps, are incredibly useful and I suspect will only become more and more apart of student and teacher’s lives. I believe as technology becomes more integrated and accessible inquiry will become easier and easier to use in the classroom as a tool for students to meet their learning needs/competencies.

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