Class this week was shorten due to the field trip to George Jay Elementary School, but we still fit a whole bunch of information into a short period of time. During class time we discussed copyright and what that looks like as a future educator. in regards to ideas and more specially photos. Valerie taught us how to access photos on the Creative Commons website instead of running into potential copyright problems, which was very eye opening to me. Moving forward I now know how to gather information and photos, as well as how to attribute photos if there is copyright on the picture. The remainder of class was spent reviewing our peers’ blogs, and I found it very interesting and insightful myself. I gained some knowledge in different areas, and I even pulled some different inspiration to jazz mine up a bit! I appreciated having that time to work toward building my peers’ up, which also helped me learn as well.

To deepen our understanding of inquiry-based learning the class took a field trip to George Jay Elementary School to talk to Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt. Rebecca gave a forty-five minute presentation about her experience and research into inquiry-based learning, and my takeaways were huge. I knew inquiry-based learning was on the rise, but I didn’t understand how that could be a reality in an elementary school classroom. Inquiry-based learning is something new to me because I didn’t grow up with that being a topic of conversation, instead it was very traditional. Knowing that teachers like Rebecca are dedicating such a huge chunk of her time to not only the students, but to the inquiry process. For someone to be so young and have such a passion for inquiry was refreshing. I hope to be able to investigate inquiry-based learning in my 3 week practicum in April.