An example of Collaborative Inquiry Learning

In the last blog I've discussed the approaches of collaborative learning and inquiry learning. By searching on the internet, I found the educational program “Belvedere”. This is a program which can be be used in a science class. It is based on the approaches of collabortive, inquiry and problem-based learning. In this program, students in secondary school are working on a science problem. They have to form little groups in which they have to do an inquiry in the topic of dinosaurs or of the Galapagos Islands. They have explore the problem, set and test hypotheses and communicate about the results to other students. I think this can be a good example of how inquiry learning and collaborative learning are combined in a problem-based environment. The students learn to communicate about their findings, they learn from the different views on a problem and they have to work together in an inquiry. This is a nice example of all the charasteristics of these approaches. I don't know if this program is allready finished, and I've not seen the program working, but based on the description and the guided tour, I think many teachers can use this program.And I think students will like it to work on these problems. 

You'll find information about the program in the following link:

http://lilt.ics.hawaii.edu/belvedere/tours/teachers/index.html