Back in February I did a 10-minute presentation in a Grade 11 assembly about a new Extended Essay wiki for UWCSEA students. A main reason was to promote National Library membership and its advantages, especially their online databases, so we also handed out the NLB’s “Don’t Panic” booklets. As they’re just at the start of the project, I think the page that interested them the most was the list of previous Extended Essays titles by UWCSEA students, extracted from the school library catalog, as students are allowed to look at past essays stored in the library, though not to check them out. I opened my slide presentation with a photo of a spiral staircase and said they might be wondering why the primary school teacher-librarian was going to talk to them about research. I said learning is a spiral and that what they’re going to do for the Extended Essay is very similar to what the PYP students do in their units of inquiry — on a higher level. The next slide was of the research wheel I use with the youngest kids — a simplified Kath Murdoch one — Tuning In, Finding Out, Sorting Out, and Going Further. They laughed.
So then I mentioned the sites they probably used all the time, e.g., Google and Wikipedia, and said the wiki had links beyond those — before going into my spiel on the NLB and other tools that might help them out.
Time will tell…
