In case you haven’t seen it yet, the July issue of Science Scope is themed around technology. We seem to think that technology means new cool tools, but I heard a social studies teacher define it as “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes” and “tools and strategies that people use to solve problems.” He [...]
Back in the 1990s, when I was a technology director, a school board member asked me “What technology should our students use to prepare them for the workforce?” I responded that what our current elementary students would use in college or the workforce had not yet been invented. The best way to prepare students for [...]
On the train, returning from a busy day in Philadelphia and the annual ISTE conference (International Society for Technology in Education), I finally had time to think. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a technology-related conference and exposition, and I used the lens of science instruction to concentrate on the sessions and the [...]
A wise professor once told us, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, pretty soon everything starts to look like a nail.” My takeaway from that class was that teachers need a variety of tools, from basic strategies to more specialized ones. And adding tools to the toolkit is part of professional development. [...]
Blogs provide a great way to extend the classroom beyond your 45 minute class period. They can be used in a variety of ways to spark discussion and student research. Chris Ludwig, a high school science teacher in Colorado, wrote this blog post to show how he used blogs this year to fundamentally change the [...]
Astoria High School in Astoria, Oregon just became an experiment in the future of student computing. The tech company Google just put an experimental laptop into the hands every one of the school’s 700 students. Beyond the usual one-to-one initiative is the fact that the particular laptop, named the Cr-48, is not a regular laptop, but more a cross between a laptop and a mobile internet device.
In the video above, a third grader gets to use a rather striking example of 21st century technology to talk about some common topics in science, namely earthquakes and volcanoes. As was mentioned in this blog before, back at the 2009 National Science Teachers Association’s national conference, Arne Duncan mentioned in his keynote that, “You [...]
Here’s a taste of NSTA San Fran. More on this later, but many of the tech tools are open-ended allowing for student/teacher defined uses. Overall, the future looks like a fun place to teach!
“To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.” —Chinese Proverb A team of science educators has developed a new NSTA position statement acknowledging the value of 21st-century skills within the context of science education (available here). The statement advocates for the science education community to support 21st-century skills consistent with best practices across a science [...]
Video analysis is a powerful tool to help physics students understand motion and other phenomena. For example, in this video by Dale Basler (physics teacher and co-host of Lab Out Loud), students can analyze the speed and position time graph of the camera in a grocery store checkout line. Grocery Store Conveyor Belt Stops from [...]
