Inquiry app gets a boost
March saw our app featured in a national publication
Kōtuitui Inquiry app featured in Interface Magazine
- 2 minute read
This month we’ve been featured in Interface, a technology magazine that includes every school in New Zealand in its distribution list. This is a pretty big deal for us so we thought we’d share how this came about.
Two years years ago we started working with the Kōtuitui Community of Learning, a collective of 12 schools in West Auckland, to develop an app to advance learning opportunities for learners within the community. The primary driver for the app was a need for the CoL to better identify evolving learning needs and drive up achievement for every learner in the community.
This understanding of the needs of the community is achieved though a teacher researching or “inquiring” into a specific aspect of learning.
Traditionally this research is performed individually and in varying degrees of conjunction with team leaders and senior management teams. What we have sought to provide with our app is the ability for teachers to research collaboratively within a clean, clear interface alongside providing opportunities for continuous engagement with both school and community leaders. The app has been developed around the Spiral of Inquiry, a methodology designed to guide a researcher though an inquiry. The spiral promotes the use of individual phases within an inquiry, which collectively form a complete inquiry. We have designed the app to make use of phases in a manner consistent with how research is performed, which is to say non-linear. The app encourages the researcher to take their inquiry in any direction at any time, while ensuring a complete overview of the inquiry is always available. This means the big picture can be reviewed quickly by the researcher, collaborators and leaders. The administrative side of an inquiry is handled by the app which means the focus for the researcher remains firmly on the detail of the research. While we’ve worked hard to ensure the individual interactions with the app are kept simple, the complexity and the power of the app is in the collective research performed and the insights it can provide.
Over the course of the last two years we’ve been steadily updating and adding new features to an app that continues to prove its worth to the community.
The app is equally at home in an individual school environment as it is in a wider CoL environment, so the app facilitates both in-school and CoL inquiries, providing a best of both worlds scenario to the individual schools and the community as a whole.
If you’re a teacher, SLT or a CoL and you’d like more information please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.
