RE: http://mr-stadel.blogspot.ca
After looking through Andrew Stadel's blog for a good 30 minutes I couldn't find a single topic that, content wise, was sufficient for me to write a blog on. It was difficult as the topics weren't really philosophical as I like them but rather seemingly superficial everyday stories from his classroom. I'm not saying they are useless, rather, I just can't write reflections or further thoughts or critiques on them. Surely, if I had a choice I'd chose another blogger to write on. Anyways, I had to think a while before I could come up with something to write on and to my surprise some profound cliche ideas came to mind. Two weeks ago in my "Designs for Science" class we had a guest lecturer who's primary focus was on visual teaching. That is, using visuals all the time, every lesson to help students be engaged in the lesson and to help them understand better. He argued, rightfully so, that as teachers we have to compete with the world of visual stimulation. Therefore, we must make our lessons more visually stimulating so that it engages the student. What I noticed on Andrew Stadel's blog is that many of his blog posts are about his classroom activities many of those have videos. That gave me the idea of presenting classroom activities and the exercises whether in science or in math in video format. That is, se it up like a movie trailer and ask the students to solve it. The cool thing is that the students if they wish, may respond in whatever format they wish whether that be on a piece of paper, in an email, in a series of pictures, or a video. Watching a video and responding to it is much more "21st Century" than opening the book to page 84 and completing exercises 3-9 don't you think?
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To this date (July 1, 2013) this is the most interesting topic I have found to write on. I was reading a blog by Geoff Krall (http://emergentmath.com/2013/03/06/how-does-one-provide-the-complex-data-of-global-warming-to-students/) that talks about teaching global warming to students through raw data. I found this interesting because, like he talks about, science is often watered down, just like math, to series of facts you learn followed by a set of questions you answer about those facts followed by a test where you spit out whatever the facts were.
Science is the subject of investigation from a set of observations. Therefore it is a good idea to teach it in that manner. How are we developing the students' power of investigation if we are doing it for them? To develop this power of investigation, students should practice observing, taking down data, looking for patterns, hypothesizing, and coming to a conclusion that either describes the data or one that leads to more questions for investigation. Many know this as "Problem Based Learning." So how do we teach that practically? Sometimes it's hard with so much curriculum to "cover." However, we can use elements from the above bolded terms in the classroom. One example is what Geoff Krall talks about, which is finding raw data and using it to find patterns. Of course these thoughts are just starting to form in my head and will take a while for me to come up with practical solutions that can be used in everyday lessons as I try to gain more experience as a new science teacher. But the least I know is that a science class is not a visit to wikipedia. |