A Better Garden Awaits!

This project is nearly complete! I have learned a lot, not only about my topic, but also about the range of emotions my students feel when they have a research based project and a deadline to meet.  I have a greater appreciation for the differences in emotions students feel depending on their stage of research. I have really become attuned to Kuhltau’s research on the emotions behind research. In younger, more inexperienced researchers, the amount of anxiety about the collected information, selecting useful information and synthesizing new information especially as a deadline approaches is likely to be high.  I now realize how imperitive scaffolding activities are throughout the research process to help minimize anxiety and allow students to focus on what is most essential.

For my waving step, I have created a PowerPoint presentation. I found myself so interested in my topic that I wanted to tell my audience more and more information in my final product.  This surprised me as, in the past, I have had to do projects on teacher selected topics and my focus for the final product was solely to cover the requirements and be finished. Not only did I find myself wanting to include more, but I have several topics that I fully intend to continue researching after this project is complete. I have listed these topics in my PowerPoint.

Wishing:  In retrospect, I really have appreciated the aspect of choosing my own topic for this project. Researching a topic in which I have genuine interest made my final product so much more detailed.  This is also an aspect that creates life-long learning. I want to learn more about this topic and now that I have found all of these great resources, I am excited to re-visit them and learn more.  In my opinion, I feel as if the wiggling process was the most difficult.  This, I believe, is enhanced by the fact that I had personal interest in the topic.  It is difficult to weed out information and decide on a focus for a final product when you are interest in all of it.  In the end, I did not focus enough and when I got to my final product I had too many sub-topics to include in the final product.  I would have needed another week to evaluate the sources I collected on these topics and put that information into my final product! I am looking forward to doing this, but from a research project perspective, I will have to really guide students in the wiggling step to ensure they have refined the focus of their research enough to not feel overwhelmed when creating a final product.

The technology I used includes:

Allexperts.com- I used this a few times to ask about pond plants and blister beetles.  This resource is fantastic I think! The answers I received were timely and really helpful. I have used other “ask experts” technology in the past but their answers either never came, or were not sufficient. I would definitely recommend using AllExperts.com to anyone.

Awesome Highlighter- This is the first time I used this technology. It is very easy to use and link to a PowerPoint.  I will definitely use this again and recommend it to my students and friends.

PowerPoint- I have used PowerPoint in the past. It is really great for creating professional quality presentations.

Delicious.com-I am logged in on Delicious as SraKuonen which is a dead giveaway that I use this with my Spanish students.  I hope everyone clicks the “gardening” tab so as to only view the bookmarks for this project and not all of the Spanish bookmarks I have! This technology is so easy to use and my collegues and log on to my bookmarks to use with their students or to add new bookmarks they find to be useful.

While I tried to decide on a format for my final product, I considered what I wanted to portray to those who view it.  Some of the items can be portrayed visually, but others cannot.  It is too early to plant seedlings indoors or actually garden, so I wouldn’t have any photographs to display or anything to videotape. There are some aspects of my presentation that can be visually displayed, so just writing a paper seemed as if it would not portray these aspects as fully as possible.  I decided that screen shots and pictures from the Internet would suffice.  In the end, I decided I would need to make my product as visual as possible while still including information in written form from the non-visual topics. In the end, I decided that a PowerPoint presentation would do both of these well. On the Big 6 Website, I read a post by Ru Story-Huffman that described several scaffolding activities for the Step 5 Synthesis.  It discusses outlining the information, jigsawing and sorting. I feel these activites would be very useful to students at this stage as it can be overwhelming for students to try to organize the information they have gathered and present their findings in a new way.  I personally, went back to look at my original questions then organized my newly found information by how well it answered each of my original questions. I feel as if I originally had too many questions to cover in the amount of time I have been working on this project, but I will be able to answer enough of them to create a good final product and whatever I do not cover for this project, I can still continue to research on my own. That is the beauty of having a topic in which I have a genuine interest, I still want to learn more even if it isn’t for a grade!

Throughout the past few days, I have begun to understand how each step in the research procedure is linked and how one moves forward and backward throughout the process. I have revised my three main topics, yet again. Rather than concentrating on seed selection, I have decided my third topic will be vegetables.  I began to look at seed selection sources and then considered that I start some of the plants in my garden as plants, not seeds. This prompted me to change that topic. 

     Soil is a main link among all three of my topics.  The water feature doesn’t depend on good soil, but it does need to be dug and our soil is hard clay so it takes some planning to prepare to dig.  Of course composting can help reduce our household and yard waste as well as improve my vegetables and plants I put around the outside of the pond.

     Some new sub-topics I have come up with since I started this blog are in the areas of vegetable plant pests, companion plants, and the best way to plan the installation of a pond.  Ann Elise’s comment on garden pests reminded me of the blister beetle infestation of our tomato plants last summer. I definitely want to find out more about what they are and how to prevent them from coming back.  I’ll try the egg shell trick Ann Elise, thanks for the tip!

     As I plan the rest of my research and look ahead to my final product, I am feeling anxious that I have so many areas to research and not much time to do it.  I considered cutting down my topic further, but I feel as if I already cut out several topics I was interested in and these are the ones I really want to learn about.

     I have Googled the terms, water feature, backyard pond, pond kit, composting, vegetable gardening, vegetable garden seeds, and expert advice on vegetable gardening/backyard water features. I found a wealth of information on all of these topics but narrowed them down to the sources that pertained to a small-scale, backyard operation but were still reputable sources.  I have these sites bookmarked on Delicious.  If all of my tabs show (I am listed as SraKuonen because I use Delicious for my Spanish students too), click on the Gardening tab to see just the bookmarks for this project.

     http://delicious.com/SraKuonen

I also searched several databases. Through the IUPUI library, I selected several databases by Ebscohost.  The databases I chose were: ERIC, GreenFILE, MasterFILE Premier, Newspaper Source and TOPICsearch.  I found several useful articles, mainly from newspapers across the country.  The more academic articles did not fit my personal inquiry topic. In evaluating my sources, I considered the size of my project and the depth of my interest, for example, I do not need information about koi fish because I do not plan to put them in my small pond. By keeping these two topics in mind, I could weed out the information that was beyond my scope.

     Now, I am in the weaving process. I have my information and I need to figure out how to organize it in such a way that it will make sense for my final product. I find myself moving forward and backward in this stage because I think of new avenues (such as whether a pond increases the number of mosquitos in a yard) and have to decide if I want to research them or if they are not part of my original topic.  I am also looking forward and beginning to plan what my final product will look like.

     It has been a lot of work so far with a lot to go, but I am enjoying the research because I am really interested in the topic. It has become abundantly clear to me that allowing children to select a topic in which they have a high level of interest really increases the amount of work they will put into a project because they really want to find out the answers to their questions.

By RKuonen