Our perennial disease research unit is on my mind year round. This important and established collaboration between the school library and our 7th grade science teachers lasts throughout the entire months of December and January and is an important opportunity for me to establish some basic research skills with all of our 7th graders (340 students, 12 sections). Since I began at Northwest in 2012 and have worked on this project, I am conflicted with my desire to pack as many skills into this unit as possible while creating a meaningful and well-crafted approach to research for our 7th graders who have not have much experience delving into this process from start to finish. While I think there is much improvement to make with this project, I am especially proud of how this project has grown this year.
We began the unit by talking about infectious diseases and their impact on global health. I showed the students the Global Burden of Disease compare chart, and this proved to be a really compelling and visual way to show the global disparities that exist (http://viz.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/gbd-compare/). This chart measures the ways in which people die and how that changes based on geographical region and age. For me, the ways in which infectious diseases are effecting people globally and in different ways regionally is one of the most compelling things about this research. Very little time goes by before I hear something about these diseases on the news or in my Twitter feed and I wanted to find a way to convey the scale of these global health issues to our students.
The students were asked to consider an essential question related to infectious disease. The teachers and I really wanted to move away from the old model of disease research where the students select one disease and then learn what they can about it (symptoms, transmission, causes etc). We show them sites like Mayo Clinic and Teen Health and Wellness that lay these facts out for them in such a clear way, it just seemed that we were missing an opportunity to ask them to think more deeply about these global health issues that are affecting people worldwide. The questions we asked them to select from were:
What kinds of conditions promote outbreaks?
To vaccinate, or not to vaccinate?
How do diseases infect the body?
Why are there diseases that we cannot eliminate?
What realistic possibilities are there for bioterrorism in the future?
What is the relationship between climate and disease?
How does globalization impact the spread of disease?
Where do new diseases come from?
What does an effective public health campaign involve?
How is our local community affected by infectious disease?
What are some of the myths and misconceptions about infectious diseases commonly found today and why do these beliefs persist?
- Develop of question of your own and consult your science teacher.
We then began to engage in research in the library for the next few weeks. The students were encouraged to use the sites and databases I linked on the library's homepage and the eBooks we purchased this year for our library collection (http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/diseaseresearch). I had already introduced the students to Easybib (which Northwest has a subscription to) in Language Arts this year so they were familiar with citing books, websites, and interviews. We expanded on these skills by showing them how to use Easybib to organize their notes and cite eBooks, images, and databases. Before winter break, all students were to have around at least 30 note cards of information that they would be able to create a project with. The students are now very comfortable taking notes this way and citing sources with Easybib. They especially enjoyed organizing their notes visually and color-coding them.
When we returned from break the students were asked to select a project they would like to complete using Prezi, Weebly, Comic Life, or Windows Movie Maker. We encouraged the students to think about the perspective they wanted to use to present. Are they a news reporter covering an outbreak? Working for a public health organization? Part of an eradication campaign? Once the students selected their project, they attended a mini-seminar with me in our computer lab where I showed them how to use the program they selected. For students that couldn't make it, or needed to be reminded about how to use these programs, I recorded several screen casts introducing the basic features of these programs to them (http://www.youtube.com/user/MissSpiering). Once we began the project we spent some time talking about using/citing all of our images. For this project students are required to not only cite all images, but to only use images from iClipart or other images they have found using a Flickr creative commons search that filters out images they do not have permission to use. They have been very successful in finding what they need.
Although, we are still working on these projects, the teachers and I can already see that the students are creating very interesting and diverse projects, and that they enjoy using these technology tools to create their projects. We have work to do on this project next year. For example, these questions that we posed were very difficult for many students to understand. Next year, I want to spend more time at the front of the project generating questions from the classes and trying to find out what the students already know about infectious diseases (maybe using Padlet?). I think this would eliminate a lot of the questions we were having on the first day of research and would also encourage the students to select more varied topics.
Next week we will wrap up this unit and I will be getting some feedback from our students through a Google survey. The responses and the finished products should provide us with some important insight into the kinds of changes we will make next year to this constantly evolving and important collaboration.
