Visuals and Questioning

When I viewed these incredible photos of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, I saw a perfect opportunity for teachers to share these visuals with students and allow students to generate their own questions.  Frequently as educators, we generate and pose questions to students.  In reality, we want our students to generate their own questions and seek understanding. 

Take the opportunity to project these photos to your students or have them view them together in small groups.  Have them write questions that come to their mind on Post-Its or notebook paper as they view the images.  Let the students get into small groups to discuss what questions came to their minds when they saw the photos.  Remind them that the goal is to ask quality questions, not find answers to the questions. 

Once you view these photos, I think you can imagine a number of questions your students will generate.  This can then be followed up with having students generate search queries to use in a search engine.   You can preview results of these search strings and offer suggestions.  I frequently have students in the elementary grades add "kid" or "student" to their search strings to zero in on better sites.

Interactive Whiteboards and Clickers in the Classroom

Marzano Research Laboratory has an online webinar as a preview for a summer two day workshop. I encourage all educators to view the webinar/preview.  Debra Pickering does an exceptional job of tying the clickers and interactive whiteboards to effective instruction.  The initial research on with whiteboards is showing great promise for enhanced instruction.

If you have the opportunity to attend the actual workshop, I highly recommend it.  Last year's summer session was excellent.  They have done additional work in this area, which will make this year's workshop even better.