Inquiry Based Learning - Timeline, Ahoy!

Digital-age students are pretty great at inquiry-based learning, and I really had no idea. 

Let me explain.

In designing a new unit around poems that are thematically tied to war, my fabulous grade-level teachers and I decided to frame our studies around a guiding question: 

How has public sentiment toward war changed throughout time? 

Rather than simply beating poems to death for the sake of passing the test, we thought we would give students a true purpose in analyzing the DIDLS (diction, imagery, details, language, and syntax) of each poem and how they contribute to tone. 

I'm actually very excited about this unit, despite knowing practically nothing about war-- which, as it turns out, is about the same for my students.

We knew that students would have to have a general background knowledge of the wars mentioned in, or that inspired, the poems we would read, so my fellow teacher had the brilliant idea to have students create a timeline. We looked at a few different websites, and each decided which one to pilot in our classrooms. I decided to use Tiki-Toki.com, which takes some practice to work, but is very functional (it even allows students to add events in BC and AD).

Rather than give students the background information, I helped to guide them through an internet search, answering the 5 W's (who, what where, when and why) for each war and finding an appropriate image from the web to represent each. I helped them to brainstorm ways to find the information, but aside from that, they figured out how to get the information they needed on their own. Students are so used to doing a Google search to satisfy their curiosity and answer their own questions that it was very natural for them to gather information on 8 different wars in a very short span of time. They didn't realize it, but they were really performing what Dewey would call "productive inquiry," or "deliberately seeking what we need in order to do what we want to do."

Then, they had to plot their information on a timeline they created on Tiki-Toki. I modeled the use of the website for them in about 10 minutes, making sure to inject a little humor to keep them interested.

There was a definite learning curve in using this website, but once I told students to ask a friend before they asked me a question about the website, the students began problem-solving on their own!

The final products looked something like this:

Beautiful, fluid, and able to be viewed in multiple ways-- even in 3D! As we move through the poetry unit, we will plot each poem on the timeline, making notes about the tone and theme, tracking how attitudes toward war have changed over time. This project will dovetail right into our research paper, and the timeline will serve as a broad knowledge base from which they conduct further inquiries.

Cool, right?