What is our Sputnik?

I enjoyed reading the article presented by Friedman, there are some great points throughout the article and message.

The first thing that needs to take place is pretty obvious, as a country the emphasis that we place on education needs to be escalated to newer levels and heights. Education needs to be a “WE” not “ME” thought process that everyone from administrators, to teachers, to students, to community members, leaders in the business world, everyone needs to step up their game, and make this about “US” and find a way to lend a hand in education and STEM education. There are jobs right now in the future that we don’t even know what they will be about, but they will incorporate the use of technology, and as educators we need to find ways to apply technology and real-world applications in the classroom to better prepare our students for these types of jobs. Applying those types of real-world applications will allow science to cross into other curricular areas of reading, writing, math, social studies, and technology that will create the types of students (I mean leaders or employees) we are looking for in the 21^st century.

Modeling Earth Science - Reflection of Instructional Plan

For your blog entry this week, share your experience of implementing your Modeling Earth Scienceinstructional plan with your colleagues. How did the use of a model work for you and your students? Share the triumphs and challenges of using models in an effort to support student understanding of complex science concepts.


For this week's model lesson, we did a learning lesson on Stream Tables and the concepts of erosion and deposition. The students really enjoyed the hands-on learning built within the lesson. 


Having the students understand the ideas of erosion and deposition was the easy part of the lesson, the challenging portion of the lesson was getting the students to relate to the real world context was the difficult part. For some of my lower learners, they had a hard time seeing how erosion, and the Colorado River have created the modern day Grand Canyon, many of them didn't see it as being possible. The biggest issue was the time (millions of years), many of the students thought this was a process that took two hundred years to take place, so getting them to understand how the earth was shaped over this long course of time was a challenge. Yet, using the stream tables was a great visual for them to learn from. 


Overall though, I was very please with how the lesson went from start to finish, my classroom area is very small to do hands-on learning tasks and the students working with water and earth materials for this lesson did an outstanding job, and I can say today that the floor is still spotless. 

Natural Disasters

For this week's discussion, I felt that earthquakes were the earth's most devastating natural disaester for human life and the environment. Earthquakes are so undetectable and the aftermaths of them can be so enormously challenging to overcome. 

One of the resources shared by our professor in regards to helping students understand the differences and effects between natural disasters was this website, http://www.stopdisastersgame.org/en/home.html, this is a great starting point for students to learn about these natural disasters and their impacts on human life and the environment. 

The thing that I liked about this website is it is user-friendly, and easy to understand and relate to for students of many different ages. Also, I can leave the site and come back to it at another time, students can collect data from it and reflect upon their learning from that data. Having the data component is also critical, as it allows students to be reflective as well as share ideas and results with other students in the class. Also, it incorporates the use of technology for our students which is a 21st century learning skill for students, so having them learn about natural disasters through this type of resource is absolutely wonderful. 

 

Ask a Scientist

As stated in the email from Dr. Lyman, my two questions that I asked on the "Ask a Scientist" Website were or haven't been answered at this point.

Hopefully in time, I hope that they do, as I am curios about the answers to both of them.

Online Presentation Tool Evaluation

For this week’s blog posting, I took a look at two different presentation tools.

1. Prezentit.com

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, I would rate this as a 3 in many ways. The only reason I gave it a few scoring points was the fact that it was free to use, which is always nice considering what teachers sometimes spend money on related to their classrooms. As nice as it was from the free standpoint, I did not like its user-friendliness. It was very difficult to work with which didn’t score well with me. One of the first things I wanted to try was incorporating an image; I failed at that part, as I was unable to make that work for me.  I was also frustrated with the fact when typing in my information, as I moved away from that work; I was unable to see that information on the screen. It was as if, it had disappeared, which was difficult to work through. I would not recommend this for our classroom project.

2. Prezi.com

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give this website a 8 or 9. It also was free, like the first one, but this one was much more user-friendly. The user-friendly component was key, as it had a great tutorial that was easy to follow, and allowed me to set up a sample prezi, before creating one for our class project. I would highly recommend this as a possible tool for individual’s projects, and I would love to try this in my own classroom.

21st Century Topics and Skills

Science Journal Blog: 21^st Century Topics and Skills

The specific area of physical science that I selected was simple machines.

The “most powerful” web address that I found is listed below:

http://www.fossweb.com/modules3-6/ModelsandDesigns/index.html

This website has many different opportunities for students to become 21^st century scientifically literate citizens. There are many different engaging experiences that require students to ask, find, predict, and explain in this website example. There are many other opportunities that allow the students to evaluate and pose arguments based on information provided in the learning throughout the website. One of the videos provided on the website is connected to roller coasters, and you could use that as introduction to the beginning of a lesson on simple machines, and what simple machines are used on a roller coaster.

 http://www.neok12.com/Simple-Machines.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/

http://pbskids.org/sid/

http://pbskids.org/zoom/

http://www.edheads.org/activities/simple-machines/

http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/web/simmach.html

http://www.mikids.com/Smachines.htm

http://www.msichicago.org/fileadmin/Activities/Games/simple_machines/

http://sunshine.chpc.utah.edu/javalabs/java12/machine/index.htm

http://www.wonderville.ca/

http://www.fossweb.com/modules3-6/ModelsandDesigns/index.html

Week # 4 Application - The Heat is On

 I want to explain my choices of materials; I choose the aluminum foil, because that is a supply that is used quite often in cooking both in the oven and also when taking a baked item elsewhere. I felt like it might have some purpose as an insulator, how much or little, was to be determined. Next, I chose the diaper, because having a two year old son and two month old son we have lots of diapers around the house, and being that a diaper does a great job of absorbing fluids, I was curious how well it did at insulating things. I chose cardboard, because we have an infinite supply of cardboard around and felt it was an easy supply to test at home. The last supply is a tricky one, my mother-in-law (a teacher for thirty plus years, soon to be retired) told me about, she had stated that rice crispy treats were used once by a student in her class for an insulator lab they did in class and they worked incredible well. So, I thought I would give them a try, I enjoy eating them so what a great way to include science and desserts into one setting! Now, this is what I predicted would happen with the order of insulation (best = first); diaper, rice crispy treat, aluminum foil, cardboard.

In conclusion at the end of the thirty minutes, I tested the temperature of the water in each container to find out which had the most significant change in temperature. These are the results that I found;

Aluminum Foil            (Start Temp) = 30       (End Temp) = 22        Difference - 8

Cardboard                  (Start Temp) = 30       (End Temp) = 23        Difference - 7

Diaper                         (Start Temp) = 30       (End Temp) = 26        Difference - 4

Rice Crispy Treat      (Start Temp) = 30       (End Temp) = 28        Difference – 2

My thoughts before completing this investigation were a little bit different than what I found out. I wasn’t completely off-base, but each of these was not in the correct order. I didn’t mention earlier, but my mother-in-law had stated that rice crispy treats are a really good insulator, that they work like Styrofoam Insulation. I think the other reason that they worked so well is the overall thickness of them played a role in their ability to insulate compared to the others that were much thinner with the exception of the diapers.

One thing I would like to tweak with this investigation, and I know that it was probably shortened just so that people didn’t have to spend time working on this lab for a long period of the week. I would have liked to see the testing time go on for a longer duration, like 2, 4, 8, or even as long as 24 hours. I think in order to truly find out which of these materials is the best insulator it would be best to complete the testing over a longer time period, because some of these supplies might lose a lot of heat initially, but over time might not lose as much as a few of the others. So it would have been interesting to test for that, I know it may not be applicable for students, but maybe?

How might you set up this or a similar experiment for students in your classroom?

Much the same way that it was set-up for my own experimenting, give the students the ability to select their own materials to test with. I think this was a great way for students to learn in an open inquiry-type of setting. I would probably have to give some parameters as to what could and could not be used, but leave a majority of that process with the students.

How might you set up this or a similar experiment for students in your classroom? How could you make this experiment more fun, interesting, or engaging for your students? How might you design this experiment so that it is relevant to students’ lives?

Right a way the first thing that came to mind with this experiment was tying this process into our discussion in class about weather. Weather is a relevant experience for each and every student in the classroom. It is a around us and affects what we do as people on earth each and every moment of the day. One of the labs that we complete helps students understand what conduction, convection, and radiation are, it is a tough lab for students to understand. This type of lab investigation might help reinforce some of those concepts through a different setting that students might connect better with.