Three week Winter Break is a wonderful thing! During that time I was able to come up with a lesson that my students will understand and be able to do. I am having them write one paragraph answering a research question; however, they first need to create a glog that answers their question with a bibliography for all sites they use for their research.
First, I decided that I wanted to teach them about big ideas and focusing their research topic from there. I therefore created this Research Report Topic Question PowerPoint presentation which leads the students from 4 large ideas to creating questions, to choosing a topic, and creating a topic question.
Then, I decided to teach students what are acceptable sites for research. I don’t allow them to use the normal search sites that they are used to, nor do I allow any wikis. We went over this and discussed why certain sites are acceptable and others are not. Some of them of course resisted, but once I explained the reasoning behind these restrictions, they grudgingly agreed. These are the websites I allowed and disallowed.
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