learnscape.org

Here is a great site for those who are struggling with the development of cloze questions in moodle.

http://www.papiamentu.info/admin/cloze

A great tool for jazzing up your Moodle or web sites with a review. Have your students create their own games for each other!

Click here for full screen version

I know a lot of my geek friends twitter. I have personally never seen a niche for this application in my toolbox. I am still overwhelmed by the world of facebook. But many science programs are making their appearance in twitter now. The Mercury Messenger project has a whole team twittering updates as this space probe slings through the gravitational force of Mercury and captures new data about this mysterious planet. I friended the crew through face book where they have general info. But they noted that twitter was where the live updates would happen.

Today I got a message about a snow depth project that will fit in nicely with our permafrost monitoring. It’s called the snow tweets project.  I just may have to twitter for this.

Dear Colleagues:

[With apologies for any cross postings.]

Now we are entering the winter season (in the Northern Hemisphere), I  wanted to remind you of the Snowtweets project that we have developed  to enable users of Twitter to “tweet” snow depth from a known  location. Snowtweets is all about encouraging specialists and non- specialists to make simple measurements of snow depth that can we can pick up from Twitter for our own data base and pass them through to a
visualization package called Snowbird (Adobe Air application available  from our web site). Snowbird posts the snow depth on a representation  of the globe (e.g. Blue Marble).

We are seeking to use this information to help with our remote sensing  and model estimates (and to provide a modicum of a public service).

To participate, you will need to have a Twitter account (free) and  start tweeting. To see the data you can download and fire up the  Snowbird application. All you need to know about how to do it, and how  to get Snowbird, can be found on our website:

http://snowcore.uwaterloo.ca/snowbird

Please feel free to join in and “tweet”. Our goal is to reach out to long-term participants (universities, schools, research centres,
community/professional groups) who have an interest in contributing  for professional/academic/educational reasons. The emphasis is on ease  of use (Twitter can be accessed through the web including via mobile  data devices) to get more people involved.

Happy Tweeting!

Richard
—————————————————–
Dr. Richard Kelly
Associate Professor
President, Eastern Snow Conference
Department of Geography & Environmental Management
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1
Vox. (+1) 519-888-4567 etxn: 35451

email: rejkelly@uwaterloo.ca
web: www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/u/rejkelly

Want to spice up your online profile? There are some fun games for creating science covers and a genius baby with your own pictures. It would be fun to do a science student of the month cover for my distance learning classes too. I think I will spice up my online profile to begin with.

Best of all, check out the great daily science links at http://www.eurekalert.org/scienceforkids/.

One  strategey that has worked for me with video classes is to start with an opener. This can be a riddle, an optical illusion, a cartoon, or interesting anomaly. This is also a good way to set the stage or connect with background knowledge and experiences. Here are some ideas to share. Please add to the list!

• Start with a video clip. The clip should relate to the day’s objective or the ongoing process of building science process skills.  I also like to show clips of famous scientist.  Teacher’s Domain has fantastic resources for lesson intros and content. Brain Pop has some great free clips and a reasonable subscription rate. Of course You Tube has a cornucopia of resource if you can find them quickly (or have access)
• Interesting fact or a Why Question How Stuff Works is are other great source to start with. You could also challenge kids to judge the credibility of web page claims and teach them how to critically choose sources. The tree octopus is a fun one to start with.
• Telling Stories. Relate the day’s objective to a funny or interesting story, myth or anecdote
• Symbols, Metaphors and Analogies . Gather an assortment of objects or pictures that are good analogies for your current objectives. Challenge the students to explain why this is a good analogy and why its a poor analogy.
• Metaphors and Analogies.
• Cartoons. What’s the punch line? Why is this funny? How does this relate to our lesson
• Writing prompts. Ask the students to write about your opener. What would you like to know? This topic reminds me of? It’s interesting because….? You can also use writing prompts or graphic organizers to help think about your opener.
• Riddles  and puzzlers and optical illusions- You can find these by searching in google. Here’s and example of a site I use. Here  is an example of optical illusions that some students have put together. Another good site is pzzls.

The schoool year has started and I am always looking for free stuff Here is a nice link to another teacher’s blog.

I was lucky enough to attend the Basic Art Institute funded by the Alaska Arts Education Consortium. Two weeks of music, drama, visual and cultural arts in Juneau at the University of Alaska Southeast Campus. What a treat. So many folks might ask, “how is art related to teaching science?” Well, check out another great project in Alaska, Project Articulate to help answer this question. Forget the grade level descriptions. You can see how the Observe, Question and Write lesson helps students learn science process skills such as inference and prediction. Alaska Landscapes with Georgia O”Keefe is a great scaffold for discussion of ecosystems and biomes.  There are many kits that compliment science well and can be “beefed” up for high school students, check out the diatoms lesson. Of course my favorite is the Andrew Goldsworthy kit. A perfect compliment to any beach or environmental outing. Here is a picture and poem of our master piece on the Auke Bay beach.

Beach Art

Balance in nature
Day and night, male and female
Perfect harmony

IMG_4456

Originally uploaded by Andrea Pokrzywinski

I had the privilege of visiting the Alaska Sea Life center this summer. They have an amazing tide pool where you can touch sea anemone and sea urchins. I could stay there all day. For those who can’t visit in person they produce fantastic virtual field trips. Check them out on the web.

Each student in my distance learning courses develops a paper science notebook. This has been a great tool for my video classes for many reasons. Often in a distance learning class, it is hard to organize and keep track of assignments. The notebook gives myself, the site teacher and the student a tangible tool to keep track of assignments, unit information and notes. Of course there are MANY other benefits to using a science notebook too. Especially for ESL students.

I was fortunate enough to attend a few good workshops on Science Notebook use in the classroom this year. I also have a great co-worker who shared a lot of knowledge with me this year. Here are some links and resources for using notebooks in the class. There are many approaches. Please email me if you have other resources to contribute to my list.

Web Resources

• Science Notebooks in the K-12 Classroom
• Fossweb Science Notebooks
• The interactive notebook
• Journal Writing
• UDL Science Notebooks – (A project to watch)

Printed Books

• There are great journal articles and books available at NSTA
• Dinah Zikes’s Foldables- I have just begin to tap the wealth of ideas presented by Dinah
• Print Cut and Fold Science

Science Specific Resources
Here are some examples of resources I use that blend nicely with the notebooks. Many of these lessons have activities where students create paper products that are ideal for gluing into their notebooks.

• The Whale and the Virus (Available via NSTA)
  The Magnificent Micro World. (AIMS)
• Animal Coloration: Activities on the Evolution of Concealment (Available via NSTA)
• Life Science Lab Kit by Michael Fleming

Thoreau has left his legacy in many ways. Walden’s Pond is a classic case study of the connection between man and nature.  Now there is a new digital resource that highlights the lives of many individuals who reflect the same connection and concern. Thoreau’s Legacy introduces the lives of Americans who are working to bring awareness about the issues of Global Warming. Each story is unique. I think my students will like reading about these people.