As you watch the webinar, Inquiry in the Social Studies Classroom and Beyond: Leading the Next-Generation Digital Citizens to Multiple Perspectives and Reliable Resources, we thought you might want a refresher on inquiry—what it is and how several INFOhio tools have used the Dimensions of Inquiry as their foundation. This is the first in a series of several posts about the inquiry process and the Dimensions of Inquiry.

Make your data speak

Numbers in a vacuum are rarely impressive. Now that you’ve got some organized data, there are lots of free applications that let you get really jazzy with your numbers. What should you do? Use your data to tell your story.

• In the first quarter of the 2016-2017 school year, INFOhio Staff, and ICoaches delivered 175 presentations to 4,701 students, educators, and administrators.
• In the first quarter of the 2016-2017 school year, the INFOhio main website had 1,143,692 page views.
• In the first quarter of the 2016-2017 school year, students in all 88 counties in Ohio logged into the INFOhio website.

How does that grab you?​ It probably doesn’t.

Do you use Scholastic News in your classroom? What about Scholastic Scope or Scholastic Science? These subscriptions are a popular teaching tool in many schools. Full of informational text and critical thinking activities, Scholastic's classroom magazines offer teachers a wealth of resources that feature popular topics and engaging graphics. You can learn more about these resources, their grade levels, and content at Scholastic's Classroom Magazines site. Additional features are available through a Scholastic school subscription.

Using graphics to support learning is a strategy proven to have maximum results for student learning in classrooms. According to the National Council for Teacher Quality in a recent study, Learning about Learning, "Young or old, all of us receive information through two primary pathways - auditory (for the spoken word) and visual (for the written and graphic or pictorial representation). Student learning increases when teachers convey new material through both." Not only should teachers pair words with graphics, they should also provide concrete and tangible examples for abstract ideas. These are two strategies identified as, "proven practices that improve learning for all students." Using PDFs from INFOhio's Explora database is one way to integrate images and concrete examples into your classroom.

Happy 2017!  Do any of your resolutions include using new and more effective teaching practices in the classroom? If this sounds familiar, then this is the blog for you! What better time to introduce teaching and learning with digital text than at the beginning of the 17th year of the 21st Century! Digital devices are a regular part of education, and a daily part of most students' lives outside of school. The best way to help our digital natives learn to use their online presence to find, learn, and evaluate is by using digital text in the classroom. That's where engaging, connecting, and reflecting come in. INFOhio's digital text can help you maximize your teaching and student learning using these actions!

Ohio's Anchor Standards for College and Career Readiness require students to 

• Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
• Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
• Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.

Close reading and analysis of text require higher level thinking, patience and focus.