What is PDI?

 Welcome!

    As a teacher it is always my goal to improve in all aspects of instruction and student learning. I'm interested in students being motivated to learn and engaged in their learning process. I want students to explore and build on skills using a wide variety of technology and strategies. Personal digital inquiry is a great way to include all levels or learner's while attending to standards and student motivation. Teachers can provide ample amounts of opportunities for students to intentionally learn new information that relates to their personal interest. PDI incorporates technology and outside resources to help students both navigate through and learn from a variety of different types of texts. 

Personal Digital Inquiry (PDI)

    Personal digital inquiry (PDI) is focused on a digital inquiry based learning process that encourages students to build upon questions, explore and discover content, collaborate, and create. Coiro, Doler, and Pelekis (2019) state that while engaging in PDI, both the students and teachers engage in collaborative discussion, analysis, and reflection that leads to students building their own knowledge, sharing their new knowledge, and expressing that new knowledge through personal actions. Teachers have a role in ensuring that the core sets of practices, wonder and discover, collaborate and discuss, create and take action, and analyze and reflect are put in place in order for students to have a successful personal inquiry-based learning process and experience. 

    A teacher's role in the process is extremely important and begins with building a personal relationship with the students. Positive relationships with teachers are the basics to helping students learn how to productively interact and learn from other people in their classroom and community. Teachers should aim to connect learning in ways that matter to the students. Connecting learnings begins with learning what student interests are and helping them learn to wonder and build their own questions. Teachers should convey that they care by providing consistent feedback throughout the process and showing students they value their interests and ideas by building a relationship that encourages creative ideas and expression (Coiro et al., 2019). Building the relationship first with students allows the personal component of personal digital inquiry to be at the forefront and brings importance to student personal preferences and allows teachers to support students as they plan for instruction. 

    The framework for personal digital inquiry places curiosity as the building foundation along with building relationships. Teachers should encourage students to be curious and generate questions often about topics they are interested in (Lee, 2014). As students wonder, discover, and inquire, students are engaged with a variety of new or old content that prompts students to generate their own questions and explore resources (Coiro et al., 2019). This portion of the process can encourage students to positively shape their own learning and can lead to students learning about real world problems related to their personal lives or communities. As students build on their questioning, the internet contains an ample amount of information that can increase students' awareness of the world around them and places students into self-directed inquiry that is purposeful (Coiro, 2015). 

    As students use resources to generate new questions students should be consistently provided with opportunities to collaborate and discuss in the classroom. Engaging in conversations about joint interest and sharing knowledge encourages students to value different perspectives and differences of other learners. Technology can cause students to be more engaged in their own personal quest for knowledge. Collaboration ensures that students learn how to work with their peers positively, consolidate ideas, and facilitate new literacy experiences (Coiro et al., 2016). Teachers should aim to model this collaboration process, teaching students how to interact with each other, argue effectively, and draw inferences from the new knowledge that is shared during collaboration and discussion. 

    As students research their wonders and engage in conversations about their new knowledge students can now create and participate in creating new products that will express their interest and understanding (Coiro et al., 2019). Student participation is a crucial step in the inquiry process and keeping students engaged in learning is the ultimate goal. Students can now assert their own autonomy and ownership of their learning and use a variety of platforms to show how their learning has developed (Lee, 2014). As students create a product they continue to engage in questions and discovery, as they gain experiences exploring and adding digital media to their final product and understanding. This allows students to continuously build new knowledge that relates to their personal project and provides them with an engaging way to link different connections in meaningful ways to their inquiry learning (Coiro et al., 2016). 

    Students bring together every core principle of learning as they analyze and reflect over the new knowledge they have learned, their creation, and the process of inquiry. Students should be modeled how to build on their understanding continuously and challenge themselves to think deeper throughout the PDI process. When students reflect on their choices they should be provided with the time and place to consider the content they have earned, the process they used to learn that information, and decided on what choices they can make to improve their understanding or their creation (Coiro et al., 2016). Reflection ensures that students are rethinking about their role in the process and can help teachers scaffold students' involvement.

  

    The personal digital learning framework has key practices that need to be understood and modeled for students in order to be successful. PDI is a personalized learning experience that includes student research content that can be related to curriculum. Each component is a cycling effect in which students are continuous building new questions as they discover new knowledge. As students find new knowledge they share and collaborate their understanding, encouraging them to think critically and in some cases generate new questions to answer. As students take this new knowledge, they can add to their creation and reflect on how the process is going. Teachers are there to guide students through this cycle as they build relationships with students and adjust planning to ensure all students are learning. 

References

Coiro, J. (2015). The Magic of Wondering. The Reading Teacher, 69(2), 189–193.   

https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1399

Coiro, J., Castek, J., & Quinn, D. J. (2016). Personal Inquiry and Online Research: 

Connecting Learners in Ways that Matter. The Reading Teacher, 69(5), 483-

492. doi:10.1002/trtr.1450

Coiro, J., Dobler, E., & Pelekis, K. (2019). From curiosity to deep learning: personal              digital inquiry in grades K-5. Stenhouse Publishers.

Lee, D. (2014). How to Personalize Learning in K-12 Schools: Five Essential Design                   Features. Educational Technology, 54(3), 12–17.                                                               https://doi.org/www.jstor.org/stable/44430266