My IO Experience

What can I say? IO was a great tool for organizing everything a teacher would want to consider in creating a unit plan. It included more important things such as student engagement, and how you plan to integrate technology and what technology it is, what outcomes it meets and more importantly, it gives you a "Learn How" tab that lets you see if you are using technology usefully, efficiently, effectively and meaningful, or if you are using it just for the sake of including it to say you "covered" that part of the expectations. It provided a critical thinking element to the way we created our unit. I was constantly thinking about the quality of the tasks/activities, how I chose to integrate technology, how meaningful the task was, and how the task flowed with the rest of the unit. It was very helpful for me to see what the other tasks and activities were so I could build off them, include my own touches, and still meet the SLEs and GLEs. This is awesome, especially for beginner teachers because it has everything you would want to consider in a single page. You can quickly browse through your unit to make sure that it flows the way you wanted it to. My favorite part of creating the unit using IO is the online collaboration. As a creator, you can invite people to view or contribute to your unit, and they contribute in real time. It is like google docs for unit plans. I think it is an exceptional resource for teachers that require a little bit more help in the organization aspects of planning a unit (like me).

Enough of preaching IO. On to the juicy stuff. Our presentation of the unit went quite well. I have to admit, the suggestion of the invitation to participate in the Inventor's Workshop was great. It immediately drew the assessors into our unit, and they were excited to be able to be a part of it. If it worked this well with adults, it will for sure catch the attention of a wide range of students from the unmotivated to the "too cool for school" students. It is like the hand written, post office-mailed letter. Everybody gets excited when they get a letter addressed to them in the mail, and the students would really enjoy having a self addressed invitation to the unit plan. Also, it serves as a unit outline for the students. It lets them know what is next on their plate, and allows them to be engaged from step one.

The groups assessing our unit plan enjoyed the tasks and activities that we had planned out. They said that the activities would be engaging, enjoyable, and had an aspect of building, creating, imagination, and best of all, FUN! It was written in between the lines in the assessment, but I think that if the groups were asked explicitly if the students would have fun, they would say yes. If they were asked if the students would learn life skills from this, they would say yes, definitely. The feedback we got was not all positive, which is quite helpful. One comment that resonated with me was wether or not the reading and games in some of the websites for the Wheels and Levers task were age appropriate. This resonated with me because I was the one who created the activities for it. Thinking about the quality of the websites, I realized that a couple of them were geared toward older students, and a couple were for younger students. I was thinking that I would include them for the "lower" and "higher" students, but this comment made me rethink my extensions and modifications. The fact was, they were working in groups, and their group members would aid their learning. For the students that are more advanced, they would be able to draw further connections and develop a deeper meaning - not only for themselves, but for the entire group. That would be their extension should they choose to extend their meaning of the activity. I chose to delete some of those sites because I felt they were not as appropriate for the students and the topic.

From this, I learned a lot about how to actually create a unit, and most of all, I learned how meaningful, helpful and necessary collaboration is in the creation/development of any unit, but especially an inquiry based unit.