ASCIENCETEACHER’s BlogRebekka Stasny is a STAR member of the Discovery Educator Network

This seemed to be one of the common themes presented at FETC this year. The DEN Day of Discovery at Sea World started with Scott Kinney’s presentation, which included the You-Tube video – Joe’s Non-Netbook. This video shows how disconnected our students are with their classroom texts.

Discovery’s very own Hall Davidson presented an eye opening key note (and not only because it took place at 7:45 am) on January 14, 2010 named Deep, Deep Dive Inside Digital: It’s Wild In there. (presentation can be downloaded at: http://www.discoveryedspeakersbureau.com/node/119) Hall’s presentation, along with the follow up discussion with Dr. Mark Edwards, Superintendant Mooresville Graded District in North Carolina and Dr. Gerald (Jerry) McLeish, Director of Secondary Curriculum Mapping, Indianapolis Public Schools, was eye opening and made me think – are my students really that disconnected with their textbooks and are we as teachers ready for the change that is about to come?States are finally changing laws about textbook adoptions – Oregon recently adopted Discovery Education in their Science Classrooms, (check out http://www.discoveryeducation.com/oregon/) and Florida is up for Science Textbook adoption this year.But is Florida ready? Can we afford not to be ready?Tracie Belt, a fellow DEN STAR and Florida LC, and I decided to try it out. At FETC we decided to try “going digital” for the remainder of the school year. Could we really give up our textbooks while covering our curriculum? We were about to find out. I am a 7th grade science teacher (teaching at a public school) with a new curriculum that was written to the Next Generation State Standards but doesn’t match up to my current textbook. In order to teach the standards as outlined in my curriculum, I need a class set of three different textbooks – 6th, 7th and 8th grade texts at least until the new textbooks are adopted that match to the new standards. And sending home 3 different science texts with all of my students just won’t work, so going digital for the rest of the year shouldn’t be that hard right? Well…stay tuned to find out, until then, check out the links above.Are you ready to go digital?

November 7, 2009

60 teachers from around Florida met for a Day of Discovery at Sea World. Led by Justin Karkow and hosted by FloridaDENLC, teachers learned how to Geocach, learned about http://edu.glogster.com, were given the task to go into the park and learn about an animal and come back and create a glog about it. Cheryl W., Tom B., and Chris B., and I chose sharks. Our new partner in crime – Denny followed us around the park and helped us to create our glog on sharks. Check it out at http://ascienceteacher.edu.glogster.com/Dennys-DOD/

Ok so I finally did it – I created a blog. Now the challenge is to keep posting to it on a regular basis. I have had good intentions in the past, but something always comes up and I realize that I haven’t updated anything for months. I already find myself spending countless hours on the computer checking email, reading posts on Facebook and tweets (I did download Tweetdeck so that helps me view many different things at once.) and I have subscribed to diigo to manage my bookmarks (learned that the hard way when all of my bookmarks disappeared during an upgrade) so it was just a matter of time til I found something else to take up any free time that I might have saved through multitasking. I do see the importance of Blogging and I have subscribed to quite a few blogs by educators who I swear don’t sleep, however we’ll see how successful I am in this endeavor. Please bear with me as I try to keep up with yet another time sensitive thing. I hope I am more successful with blogging than I am with keeping up to date lesson plans!