What did I learn?
One of the activities that we did today was to create charts about a change in population, through history, for a given area by using GapMinder.org. After having an introduction to the activity and website, we were broken into groups and needed to find a world phenomenon and use the graph from GapMinder to help us explain the phenomenon. Though there were so many options from GapMinder, but it seemed that the ideas that we had didn’t have enough information on the graph to help support the phenomenon that we anticipated, so we had to brainstorm another set of data to use.
What do I still have questions about?
This activity was rather frustrating because it seemed like we could not find the graphs to support the phenomenon that we wanted to present. If I were to do a similar activity in a classroom I wonder if there would need to be additional boundaries or expectations, so that students don’t get frustrated and become disengaged. It seems that many students need some requirements to follow, at least with my 3rd graders. Or, is this activity (and GapMinder) intended for older students?
When conducting an activity like this, would it be best to have the students (older students – particularly in a middle school setting) become focused by working together with block teachers in order to integrate or enhance other lessons? Or is it the open-endedness alone that will engage students because they will be using their interests to select data?
What are the implications for the classroom?
Having students find their own data makes the activity more relevant to their lives. For my 3rd grade classroom, I would have students find a topic of interest or create a hypothesis before doing research, simply because of the amount of time that it seems to take the students to complete open-ended tasks. Students at this age can collect data from their peers and graph it, telling a story that is about their classroom.
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