PLN Journal Week 4: Research 101 on TL Virtual Cafe and Discovering Question Lenses

Throughout the past school year, my district's Library Council has been focusing on developing resources to support research, and so this week, I took the opportunity to watch a recording of the February 2016 TL Virtual Cafe session Research 101. The webinar presenters were school librarians Neha Thakkar and Tiffany Whitehead (AKA Mighty Little Librarian). My favorite takeaways from the session include the following:

• Thakkar utilizes a flipped model, creating videos for students by students. She also utilizes Google Forms as an exit slip for assessment purposes. This reminds me how I would like to create more screencasts for my students and teachers. Also, I recently experimented with Google Forms for formative assessment purposes and found it to be helpful. Rather than using a form as an exit slip, though, I had students complete it near the beginning of class, and then we debriefed the results together.
• Thakkar has students create word clouds in order to identify essential ideas. An area for growth that I have identified with many research projects is that students do not spend enough time formulating topics and developing essential questions. I will add this technique to my arsenal as I develop resources to support this research phase.
• Whitehead shared Google Search Education resources, highlighting in particular the Picking the Right Search Terms lesson, which includes a link to an accompanying slide deck and How Search Works video. I need to spend time reviewing these resources so that I may start to plug in the quality and ready-to-use lessons and activities.
• Whitehead highlighted Common Sense Education: Digital Citizenship resources, including a lesson on Identifying High-Quality Sites. Common Sense Education is a site that I often turn to, but they have many resources that I haven't yet tapped into. This is a reminder for me to return to the site and review unexplored content.
• Whitehead introduced the idea of Question Lenses, providing a link to Buffy Hamilton's blog post on Formulating Research Questions with Birds of Feather Collaboration and Writable Sources. As mentioned above, I am looking for ways to help students develop research questions, and so this model stood out to me and led me to do further investigation. Below are some helpful links that I discovered:
• Looking at Our Topic Through Different Question Lenses (Buffy Hamilton)
• Moving From Our Mindmaps to More Focused Topics with Question Lenses and Musical Peer Review (Buffy Hamilton)
• The Role of Essential Questions in the Inquiry Process (Marci Zane)
• Musical Questions: Broadening and Narrowing Our EQs (Marci Zane and Cathy Stutzman)

I feel grateful to be living and working in a time when we have access to these shared resources. Thank you to all of the educators who share their best practices and experiences!