My SOLE Sugata's Wish

I would like to share with you my experiences of self-organised learning.
I started this journey as a natural response to the lack of enthusiasm for research amongst many of my students. We were investigating the big question "How and why do landforms change over time?" And despite their initial enthusiasm, I was having trouble getting them to transition to writing notes o as a means of collecting disseminating new information.

Then I decided to give them all the control and see how that went...

I introduced them to Thinglink, an interactive, multimedia, digital poster. They asked if they could do some searches, they spent one lesson doing key word searches to find other people's work. Just like the opening of the lesson, they were enthralled by what they discovered and began asking each other lots of questions about how it worked and where the linked information came from. They began tinkering with their own.

In their groups, the students began asking how, what and where to source the links that they wanted to attach to their Thinglink. They wondered about how to share and save what they found. One bright spark suddenly remember how they could share in real time with a Google Doc.

And so they were away...
The most startling revelation for me was the way that the students moved fluidly between groups sharing what they had learned about the technology. How freely they asked for help and how quickly they synthesized what their peers had shown them. Mostly I was impressed by the depth and commitment they went to in search of the "just right" pieces of information: the perfect links, the ideal images.

We had class discussions on how to source reliable information and how important the presentation of their learning was. The students spent more time researching than I'd ever experienced before and I had a hard time convincing them to go to recess when the bell rang. Each new piece of information seemed to draw them deeper into their learning and create new questions that they sought answer for.

A time to reflect...
As individuals completed their projects they were very eager to show and discuss their artefacts with other students. My students are used to reflecting on their learning and several of them chose to do this on our class blog.