🚀 Re-thinking Grade 5 Exhibition Research: Using Obsidian as a "Second Brain"
One of the biggest challenges during the PYP Exhibition is teaching students how to move beyond "copy-pasting" facts. We want them to find gaps, see connections, and propose real solutions.
To solve this, I am introducing a new workflow using Obsidian. While my students are already comfortable using OneNote, I’m adding Obsidian to our toolkit for one specific reason: The Graph View.
The "10-Minute Daily Habit" Strategy
I’m not waiting for the Exhibition to start. Instead, we are starting now with a "Slow Research" approach. For just 10 minutes a day, we tackle a real-world class problem (e.g., "Why is our playground so messy?" or "How can we improve our line-up time?").
The First Month: We research one collective problem together. Students learn to create "atomic" notes—one idea per note.
The Transition: After 30 days of this daily habit, the students will be ready to fly solo. They will have the "muscle memory" to explore their own Exhibition topics independently.
From OneNote to Obsidian: Why the Switch?
We still love OneNote for organizing handouts and long-form writing, but Obsidian offers something OneNote doesn't: Visual Logic.
OneNote is like a digital binder (folders and tabs). It’s great for storage.
Obsidian is like a digital brain. Because it has the Graph View, students can literally see the connections between their findings.
If a student has a cluster of notes about "Ocean Pollution" and a single, lonely note about "Plastic Straws" with no line connecting them, the gap is visually obvious. They don't need me to tell them they missed a link—the graph tells them.
3 Simplified Mini-Cases for Practice
Here are the cases we use during our 10-minute daily sessions to train our "connection muscles":
The School Canteen Puzzle: Linking short lunch breaks to food waste.
The Screen Time Dilemma: Linking "blue light" to morning tiredness.
The Fast Fashion Mystery: Linking the "Lost and Found" bin to global water shortages.
The Goal: Independent Explorers
By the time the Exhibition officially kicks off, my students won't just be "searching for info." They will be Knowledge Architects. They will look at their Graph View and say: "I see a gap here, and I have a solution that connects these three problems."
