If my students love their iphones as much as I do, then we are crazy not to leverage these mobile tools. You might think that students in rural Alaska wouldn’t have a lot of cell phones. Thanks to a rural program sponsored by GCI most of my students can afford to own their own phone. Most of them have them and use them. Not all of them are smart phones, but I suspect they will have them soon.
There are several apps that illustrate the potential of hand held technology. Today I learned about Google’s Sky Map App.
I haven’t posted to this blog in a long time. I have been more preoccupied with getting my lessons organized and sorting through resources for each of these. It seems to be a never ending process. I am also participating in our district curriculum review process and we talked about sharing resources. This blog is becoming my repository of links. I am updating my pages to reflect specific resources that I use throughout the year.
But I also use delicious a lot. It is so easy to tag a site. Though choosing the right tag can be tricky. Sometimes I forget how I tagged an item or I have too many items with this tag. I’ll post my tag cloud here for awhile. Feel free to become apart of my network. I need to get better at searching my network tags too.
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:
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
Thanks to the crew at NSTA. I discovered some new resources for teaching environmental science. Environmental System Science Education Alliance (ESSEA) has published 28 problem based modules on their web site. Each problem presents a seperate case with resource links and activities for students to help answer the questions posed by each case. Teacher’s can login to the site and have access to student management and assessment tools. This could be a great add-on to my courses. Or perhaps I can adapt some modules for enrichment.
I was also happy to see they had a a permafrost case study about Alaska. They cite Kenji’s work with schools and collecting permafrost data too.
It was a busy spring semester and I didn’t add much to this blog. But the school year is over and I have a renewed interest in documenting ideas and resources I stumble upon. Here’s one to start with. It’s from the Illinois Online Network. They have a list of blogs and my favorite area is the site called Pointers and Clickers
The Concord Consortium has created over 100 Inquiry Based Science activities that can be accessed through an online portal. This portal allows teachers to facilitate the activities online. Many of the activities utilize science probes. The software and content is opensource and designed to work with most probeware. All of the software that requires downloading is Java based.
This fall I used their pedigogica genetics software with my video classes. It was a fantastic activity for modeling genetic inheritance. I have not used the probeware activities. I must figure out a way to purchase probes for my classes. It’s going to take me a while to understand the interface but I think this has huge potential for teaching science at a distance. The portal also allows teachers to develop their own activities using tools developed by this project too.
I have been using the Teaching Boxes resources from DLESE in my Earth Science class. I like these lessons and resources because they are inquiry oriented and include cooperative learning/grouping. All of the resources are available in a digital format. You do have to collect materials for the hands-on materials. I think it would be very easy to incorporate these in an online course as well as the video conference format. The one thing that is missing is the assessment component. I do need to build some rubrics and assement guidelines for these lessons.
I just learned about two new tools for using Skype. FIrst, the new mac version supports desktop sharing. It’s beta but it works very well. Another gadget that’s now on my shopping list is a USB conference speaker. This would allow you to use speakerphone features as you skype. Great for long conference calls and chats with several folks at one site. It’s about $150.00.
I just stumbled upon this today when I was looking for resources on the rock cycle. Anenberg has published some self study modules that are interactive and include a quiz at the end. These would be good resources for students who miss a unit and need to make up work. Also wonderful for folks who teach online courses. I may be able to use one or two as a demo as I introduce new topics.
I experimented by adding an online unit into my video course for Ecology. This worked because all of my students have laptops at these sties. We are in the middle of the What about Wolves Project. These are online units that are free. You can set up any of the projects for your students. They are very nicely organized and follow a science notebook format. The students enter their writing online and I grade their activities online. The students can work collaboratively in small groups online. WISE is operated by the University of California at Berkley.
I have been integrating the use of science notebooks in my video classes this year. This low tech tool has really added to the effictiveness of the classes. I will have to reflect more about this when I am not in the thick of my teaching year. But here are some good links to science notebook sites.
I have been trhilled to have access to Youtube this year. Thanks to the tech guys! There are some great short animations on topics such as osmosis, mitosis, meiosis, cell membranes and more. Nice starters and additions to lessons on these topics.
My students do a lot of drawing in their science notebooks. I am always reminding them of the importance of scientific illustration. These two videos are stunning examples.
I just recieved a Ken-a-Vision Digital Proscope for about $350 dollars. The scope has a USB connector and digital capture software. This will really be great for biology. The students can follow along with me as they learn to use their microscopes. This scope is very comparable to the light microscopes they have in their classrooms (40x-400x). They can also see my results and compare theirs. The scope takes timelapse and video too. My cheek is still a bit sore from scraping
