Category: Free Inquiry

The PhET simulations are an interesting attempt to all students to experience science as a scientist rather than as a student. This is also done while reducing the financial investments by the school and instructor. They do not however, reduce the amount of preparation by an instructor as they need to know of all the parts of that simulation, so that they can answer any questions that come up while students work through the simulation. However, they can reduce the amount of lesson planning if the instructor shooses one of the lessons from their website. This would in theory reduce as they repeat the simulations, while that is less true for repeated labs. As such, I believe that these simulations have a place to explore ideas which cannot be performed or seen in a schoolroom lab.

Their activities come setup for inquiry based learning, where students can ask their own questions about the particular simulation. For what its worth, I do remember doing simulations like these as a high school student and I did not find these simulations engaging since they were presented as work, and I did not freely choose the topic. Free inquiry based learning to me, requires self-motivated engagement on the part of the students. As such, I don’t know if these simulations can be used as free inquiry, but they could support guided inquiry as discussed by Trevor Mackenzie. This guided inquiry, where students explore a simulation based on prompts by the teacher allows students to explore specific ideas without having the answers presented to them.

In summary, I believe that the PhET simulations have usefulness in classrooms, to engage students and provide accessibility to students who could not otherwise see these experiments. However, they do not provide the level of guided inquiry which or involvement which I was hoping to see.

Kahoot! is an incredibly useful platform for motivating students to engage in their learning. It does this by gamifying the learning process. I have used Kahoot! since 2012 as a student and as a TA since 2020 when it became difficult to create a sense of community in the classroom as we were all online. I turned entire tutorials into Kahoot games where students were engaged and thinking about the questions that were asked.

In this manner, creating competition can generate interest and encourage socialization where it may not already be occurring. There are, however, downsides to using Kahoot and gamifying learning. If students are competing against each other, and that is the only type of interaction that occurs in your class. Your class culture will likely create a sense of competition among students outside of these games. In a subject like math, where students may already feel lots of anxiety, this could result in pushing students away from participating in your class as they are afraid of losing, i.e. being wrong. This destructive culture could result in less student interaction and increase their anxieties around grades, rather than increasing interaction as intended. Therefore we need to be careful about how often we use direct competition in our classrooms, and remember to emphasize the collective nature of learning.

In Weekly Reflection 1: Most Likely to Succeed, I used Mentimeter to create a word cloud of all the ideas that came up as I watched the movie, Most Likely to Succeed. This is one simple way that I can use this program in my classroom. It is often difficult for teachers to track their students’ self-reflection while they are watching movies as the writing often happens after the movie ends in individual notebooks. Mentimeter provides a space where all of a class’s responses are entered into one location, and valuable information based on time and responder are attached to each response. In this way a teacher can see when a student has what thought, and watch their class’s collective thoughts progress and evolve.

Additionally, being able to integrate interactive slides into your presentations means that there is an engagement baked into direct instruction sessions. This enhances my ability to use formative assessment as I no longer need to remember how all of my students respond to questions in class. It also provides opportunities for students to tell me that I need to slow down, anonymously.

My only concern with using mentimeter is that I cannot rely on it until I have met all of my students and know that they will reliably have access to a phone, tablet or computer in the classroom.