Category Archives: SciLinks

The official blog site of SciLinks—putting the best teacher-vetted web resources at your fingertips. Click on a headline to read the entire post.

Science careers

There was an interesting article recently in eSchool News. Survey: Educators aren’t discussing STEM careers with students reports on a survey of students who basically said that their teachers make the content interesting, but they don’t always make the connection to science and engineering as careers. To access the entire article, you need to subscribe [...]
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Differentiated instruction

Consider the facility that students have with electronic communications and games. They somehow had to “learn” how to use these tools and figure out the rules and strategies of the games. But I heard some teachers talking about how “students do not want to learn.” The evidence the teachers had for their statement was their [...]
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Going green

Teachers use several strategies at the end of the school year. One strategy is to try to cram in as many topics as possible in an effort to “cover” everything.  Other teachers use culminating or capstone projects to integrate concepts and give students a chance to use what they’ve learned in science (and other subjects). [...]
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Science in the community

I’m hoping that secondary teachers will take a look at the articles that describe authentic investigations conducted by young scientists in their communities: Creative Soil Conservation and Boulder Creek Study. The latter has examples of student work as they studied the water quality in their communities, using various indicators, including the presence of aquatic invertebrates. [...]
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Science and current events

To help students understand this month’s earthquake in Haiti, the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology has compiled a set of resources called Recent Earthquake Teachable Moments. These include links to animations and visualizations, presentations, news releases, and other materials for students and teachers to explore seismology within the context of current activity. These resources are [...]
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Diversity and adaptations

The article What’s behind the biological classification system in use today? goes beyond memorization and the mnemonic devices used to remember the hierarchy (King Philip Came Over From Germany Smiling was my bio teacher’s favorite). The author reviews the rationale for classification and describes the cladistics mechanism used in the classification today. Although there are [...]
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Science literacy

Making the connections between science, reading, writing, and media literacy has been a professional interest of mine for many years. So I get really excited when The Science Teacher has literacy as a theme. In addition to these articles, SciLinks has additional resources under the topic Reading and Writing in Science with ideas to help [...]
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Observations and data from nature

The word “data” for some people conjures up pages of numbers or a dreadful experience in statistics class. But get rid of the deer-in-the-headlights look and dig into lessons focused on forensics, snow, fruit flies, and Down syndrome. The protocols, rubrics, and examples can help you work with students in this critical inquiry process. I’ve been [...]
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Light and electricity

A few years ago, I found some interesting background data for a professional development project I was working on–when elementary teachers were asked to name a specific science area that they would find difficult to teach, more than 60% mentioned physical science. And yet this is an area in which students can have a high [...]
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Let it snow!

Here in the Northeast, we had to dig our way through the recent storm, the most snow we’ve had in my neck of the woods for two years! I once hosted an exchange teacher from Australia in January (their summer break), who had never seen snow. Snowplows, snowblowers, snowshoes, and skimobiles were all new to [...]
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