My class has just finished just about three months of intensive work on their Explora Vision Project and Science Fair Projects. These are inquiry based projects driven by the students’ curiosity over the topic of their choice, and as well by the desire to aim at a calibre of work that meets the competition level criteria. As these are projects that required an application of all the skills the students may have or are yet to learn as of this point, there was definitely a range of skills and learning needs that needed to be met and scaffolded for each individual student. Among the skills called for were: skills in applying reading strategies (such as visualization, making connections, questioning, analyzing, evaluating and summarizing), skills in effectively writing a report or a persuasive piece, skills in the use of technology to research and to present information, skills in organizing tasks and time, and skills in orally presenting to an audience. Indeed, with the immensity of the task and skill set demanded, but with not enough time to spend in conferencing one to one with each student, as a teacher, I knew I needed to pull out not just my strategies as a teacher that I’ve always tried, I would also need to innovate my teaching. I needed to learn to tap on the power and ease technology can offer to meet at least some of the tasks we needed to do.
Knowing just the basic so far in using technology, I knew, I could at least tap on its potential to make our task efficient. Thus, I emailed students both as a class and individually, tasks, schedules, reminders, or feedback about their work so far. We’ve communicated by email even through weekends, after school hours, or even during the Spring Break! In the classroom, I noticed that even students in the same group have also started using email to communicate their share of work to each other. It saved us so much time, as well as maximized the time we have for enhancing the depth of our research and quality of our work. Having spent so much time browsing the online resources, students have had the chance to access tons of information in print, images and video format. They have also discovered how to locate scholarly articles if they are looking for Scientific Studies done so far on their topic!
What I realized? Every bit of knowledge counts… it is not to be underestimated. Something as simple as an email could be a powerful tool to make the task efficient and meaningful.

By Melinda Severa
Prairie Rose School