I am in the process of building my own “PLN” but sometimes it is hard to keep up with everything. I have not been able to “get into” Twitter. Ning is blocked at my school and my off hours are the time that I have to read. I do read many blogs and belong to several e-mail based teacher groups. It makes me feel less alone in the big education world especially teaching in a small school and being the only physics teacher. I do also frequently search around the web for what my children call my “subject of the day.” Today’s subject of the day was “Web 2.0 in Education.” I have been using Discovery Streaming quite often with my freshmen classes and would like to incorporate other Web 2.0 applications with all my classes. My goal this week is to incorporate at least 2 new Web 2.0 applications with my older classes.
As I was looking at this presentation, I was thinking about my own classroom. I teach at a 1:1 laptop school. I turned down having a Promethean Board in my classroom a couple of weeks ago. With a tablet laptop, projector, and a document camera, it seems like the Promethean Board would have been too much of a good thing. I do wish that I had more room in my classroom because the only practical set-up is desks in rows and this does not promote the spirit of collaboration that I want in my classroom.
I have been looking at something to use to post assignments. I found it with Wallwisher.com. It is very easy to use and can be embedded into a web page or a link can be sent to students. You can make it private where only you can edit it or make it a group project and anyone cane edit it. You can also put images or video into it.
In my presentation on Science Notebooks at LSTA this week, I talked about the Scientific Method Journal that I use when teaching my students the scientific method and how to write a lab report. This is an example of using a journal within the Interactive Science Notebook. This is the through activity and as an out activity, they conduct a simple lab from the problem to the conclusion and write a lab report. If you print this 2-sided and then fold in half, it will make a booklet and be in order. Scientific Method Booklet
I have made my first assignment using Discovery Streaming Builder tools and I love it. I think that I am hooked. I decided to start with something simple, but I wanted to meld our 1:1 laptop technology with the science notebooks that I feel are an essential part of student learning. For the In Activity, students are given the following words: matter, element, mixture, pure substance, compound, heterogeneous mixture, and homogeneous mixture. Using 3×5 index cards and the internet, students will make a definition card as seen below:
Definition Card
They will then view some videos from Discovery streaming and then take the relationships and use https://bubbl.us/beta/ to make a concept map.
I will be presenting a session at the LSTA convention on “Notebooking in the Science Classroom.” It will focus on how to effectively use a science notebook in the middle or high school classroom. I have used notebooks in one form or another for the past 5 years. I do this even though I have taught in a 1:1 laptop school for the past 7 years. Everything that is graded goes in the notebook and I pick up about 5 notebooks from each class each day to give feedback on their work. The notebook is where I do all my formative assessments. I know that theory says that formative assessment should not be graded but if I did not give some points, then some would not do it so I compromise and give points for the formative assignments.
In this project, students will take a virtual field trip beginning at our school in LaPlace, Louisiana to the sites of several nuclear disasters that have occurred in the world. The field trip will end at the closest nuclear power plant to our school, the Waterford Nuclear Power Plant in Taft, Louisiana. At each stop on Google Earth, the students will encounter a digital Glogster poster that contains embedded video from Discovery Streaming, YouTube, and TeacherTube. There will also be quotes imported from Wordle from major figures involved in the incident. Pictures from various websites including Discovery Streaming will also be featured on the poster. As the assessment to this project, students will make a 5 minute podcast in which they will describe what would happen if there were to be a nuclear accident at the Taft Plant. Below is the Glogster that I made for the Three Mile Island portion of our Virtual Field Trip. This will be embedded on Three Mile Island on Google Earth so that students can see where Three Mile Island is located and they can learn a little of the history of the Island.