Instructional Project Reflection

For our final project, my group decided to do a live database tutorial that would assist a fictional 8th grade class in their research for a fictional biographic research project. This activity would also assist the fictional teacher who assigned the project, as their students would be better prepared to complete the assignment. Choosing a topic for our lesson was fairly easy: we knew we wanted to teach middle school students and we also wanted to teach a database, so we browsed Dominican's offerings to see what would be age-appropriate and what could be linked with an actual classroom assignment (as opposed to doing a database walk-through just because). Britannica Online has a very user friendly interface that can be used by students young and old, and we liked the extensive biographies it has, so we went with that.

Creating the lesson once we had an end assignment and a few potential standards/outcomes took some trial and error, but on the whole was very productive. We tossed around ideas for database scavenger hunts, worksheets, and team competitions to find certain information. We all wanted to make the tutorial fun, interactive, and not too stressful - using the database isn't the assignment our fictional students are getting graded on, so our goal was more focused on getting them comfortable with the different features and with composing appropriate research questions than in quizzing them on the database itself.

The easiest way to engage learners is to get them doing something. Make it interactive, make the student the expert, and keep the stakes low. Our scavenger hunt starts with easier questions that get more challenging as the students explore, but there is no wrong way to find the answers. The important part is that the students try, and that they observe how their classmates found the information. If two students find the same information in two different ways, they are both right! I'm hoping the "challenge" factor engages our learners and increases their comfort with the database.