The KIE environment was designed to support the principles of Scaffolded Knowledge Integration: helping your students to integrate what they learn in science class with prior school knowledge and real-world experience, so they can make sense of new knowledge and put it to use. It was also designed to help them become intelligent and critical consumers of Web information. 

This page provides some pointers for achieving these goals with your students in your classroom. These are some things to consider to help your students get the most out of KIE: 

• Fitting the project with your curriculum
• Planning student teams
• Introducing KIE
• Facilitating knowledge integration

Fitting the Project with Your Curriculum

Your first step is to select a KIE project: choose an existing project from the Curriculum Library, or build one of your own on a topic that you choose. 

If you are using an existing project, take a look at the evidence and lesson plan. Depending on what related topics you've already covered in your class, the reading level of your students, and the time you have available, you may decide to use KIE's project management tool to select a subset of the evidence or add some of your own. For example, if a relevant scientific discovery was just announced last week, you can add a piece of evidence that refers to it. (Visit the Developer Center for advice on building and modifying projects.) 

The lesson plan that comes with the project will give you some ideas of off-line activities and discussions to use with your students. This plan is intended to be tailored if you want to integrate an additional hands-on activity or topics that will have particular relevance to your students.

Planning Student Teams

KIE projects are usually conducted with pairs of students working together. The goal is to facilitate a social learning environment, allowing students to discuss their scientific ideas together. In preparation for the first KIE class you'll want to define and post student teams for the activity. 

If you don't have enough computers for students to work in pairs, you can either use larger groups or rotate pairs through on-line and off-line activities. Keep in mind that students will be thinking and typing together, and it can become difficult to maintain involvement for everyone with large numbers sharing a single machine. You can also vary the teams by asking students to survey evidence in pairs, then work with a larger group for the final project (e.g. to conduct a final debate).

Introducing KIE

When you plan your first day with KIE, think about introducing students to the project on several levels: the software itself, the science topic and its relevance to other areas they've studied, and other skills related to scientific thinking. For example, the following concepts that are inherent in KIE may be new for your students: 
• In KIE, scientific information is presented in the form of evidence which students are asked to understand and evaluate. A useful analogy is a courtroom: if you were on a jury for a particular case, what types of evidence would you look for? 
• Rather than accepting Internet information at face value, students are asked to critique what they read. A useful introductory activity is to facilitate a discussion in which students offer a critique of a movie they have seen, or an article or ad they find in a magazine, to define some characteristics of a good critique.
• In KIE, students take notes on the evidence. Unlike other notes students are accustomed to taking, these are not intended to be a summary of the content; rather, they should represent analysis of the information with respect to the topic of study - what did we learn from this? how reliable and relevant do we think it is? Mildred the Cow is available with prompts and questions to guide this analysis. You may need to reinforce to students the importance of consulting her. 

Facilitating Knowledge Integration

Many of the topics and evidence selected for KIE projects are designed to bring out ideas that students have about the world and help them link those to more scientifically normative viewpoints. 

For example, most students have observed that metal objects usually feel colder to the touch than wood objects. In the KIE project All the News, students critique a "tabloid" article that asserts, among other things, that some materials are "naturally cool".  

KIE teachers often find that one of their most important roles in the classroom is to encourage students to articulate their views and the basis for them, and to bring out additional observations that may help them consider alternative explanations. In the above example, using a thermometer to measure the temperature of a wood object and a metal object in the room is a good way to prompt such a discussion. Mildred also provides many thought prompts; at first, students may need help beginning discussions around the ideas she provides. 

Examples of activities and discussions to facilitate with the whole class or with individual students can be found in the lesson plan for each KIE project. Before you begin a KIE project with your students, it is helpful to think through the various pieces of evidence and select discussion topics that will have particular relevance for your students or ties to prior experiments they have conducted. 

Project wrap-up is another important opportunity to ask students to contribute their views, reinforce links, and provide closure. Again, consult the lesson plan for suggestions. 

Send inquiries to kie_info@www.kie.berkeley.edu. (Modified November 97, Vygotsky) UC-Berkeley Copyright © 1995-97 KIE Research Group and the UC-Regents.