See Think Wonder

Provocation and Follow-up

Our new unit is about trading. We are looking at what trade is, what people trade, how they trade, what happens if they have nothing to trade and what our responsibility is in that whole process… The Enduring Understanding for this unit is: The production and distribution of goods and services can benefit and disadvantage communities.

We started by looking at Poverty. The provocation was a gallery walk of photos taken by my colleague when travelling around the world. The students were not given any front loading about the subject matter prior to this.

We used a See-Think-Wonder approach. Everyone had a bunch of slips with “I see, I think, I wonder” on each.

Image: Lindy Buckley

They saw, thought and wondered and then pinned the slip beside the photo.

Image: Lindy Buckley

After this quiet activity, we made small groups, each group to look at all the slips with a picture, to see if there were any common thoughts or wonderings. We also looked at the wonderings, doing a basic sort into questions that you could answer fairly quickly with yes or no and questions where you’d have to find out more to be able to try and answer. We talked about how much information you could get from an image. (Visual Literacy)

Image: Lindy Buckley

Killing two (actually more) birds with one stone, as it were, we went on to learn how to create a google presentation AND how to use Compfight to look for Creative Commons picures. Students chose 3 pictures from their search and placed on 3 slides, correctly attributed to the photographer.

They made notes about each image using the same See-Think-Wonder strategy. The next tech learning was using Quicktime with their google presentation, using their notes to talk about their pictures.

There’s a lot of tech learning going on. At the same time I hear students talking with each other about the content of the images. Living in Indonesia, we all see images of poverty through our car windows on a daily basis. 

As we start investigating aspects of trade, we’ll keep looking back at the poverty introduction to see if there are connections.

And HERE is how we created the presentation…

Warning! This is NOT a Presentation Zen!

Presentation Zen allows the presenter to use the images on a slide show as tools. The audience watches. The presenter talks. A Presentation Zen slideshow on its own has little meaning to the audience.

This slide show was created by me after a lesson on the topic. I sent my students the link so they will have the shared doc in their Google Drives to refer to if they forget any steps of the process.