Designing a curriculum for high school Health that is engaging and effective in preparing students to live healthy lifestyles can be a challenge. Currently, in the state of Washington, state standards focus on students learning about how to make healthy decisions that will positively affect their physical, mental and social well being. This can include modules on nutrition, social relationships, exercise, mental health, and diseases. To assist students in understanding how to make healthy decisions, it’s important that they have access to reliable research. By providing students with resources that can assist their information literacy development, students can develop the necessary tools to access, analyze and apply information.
The Learnist is a website where users can search by category or interest to discover different articles, photos, videos or resources. The site is built similarly to Pinterest in the sense that it operates with “boards”. For example, if you are looking to learn more about vitamins, or how to rotate your tires or even how to remember your students in names in class these questions are loosely categorized (see image 1) by different boards that users have created as a platform for “learnings” (places you go looking for answers).
(Image 1)
This resource would fit nicely in a high school Health classroom in two ways. First, it could act as a resource for students to use when they have a question slightly related, but off topic from the day’s lesson. I sometimes find that when students become truly engaged in a lesson, they begin extending their curiosity on the subject by asking “what if questions”. These are always great learning opportunities, but if the lesson plan doesn’t allow for an off-track conversation on if northwest inhabitants are all deficient from vitamin D since we don’t have many sunny months, than the Learnist could be a great place to send students to explore the question and report back the next day. Secondly, the Learnist allows users to create profiles and boards where they can post learning on a specific, searchable topic. These boards are searchable by users via categories and keywords but are also accessible to non-users who have the link.
Below you can see my profile (image 2) as well as an example board I created that would be a helpful resource in our exercise module when I discuss the tabata fitness method. In image 3, you can see my tabata board has two different uploaded learnings: one is a tabata article from Men’s Health magazine explaining the method and providing an example workout. The other is an app that students can download when they tabata which provides pre-programmed music for tabta-specific workouts. Both of these learnings were easily uploaded and shared to my board.
(Image 2)
(Image 3)
The Learnist is an easy resource to use and would be a great way to both stimulate students during modules they may not have significant history exploring as well share articles or media on a specific topic. My only concern in using this resource for its research function is the credibility of its findings. Since anyone can upload anything to their boards, it would be up to the students to filter sources for reliable data from the ones that are biased or unsupported. For this reason, I would introduce this website to students with caution and remind them to utilize their information literacy tools we reviewed.
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