Science Teaching for the Future | Resources for teachers taking their classrooms into the 21st century with project-based learning ideas, inquiry based activities, and tools for flipping the classroom.

What the STEM Industry Can Teach Us About Education

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

This summer I was fortunate enough to attend a 5-day training in preparation for my first year as a Dayton Regional STEM Fellow for the Dayton Regional STEM Center. Two of the days were spent learning about how to design a quality STEM lesson using the engineering design process, inquiry, and backwards design. I’m excited to share these resources with you in another post.

The other three days were spent touring five local STEM industries: Cornerstone Research Group, UES, Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), Mound Laser & Photonics Center, and The IDEA Lab.

At first, I was unsure about the usefulness of these tours – what could a high tech laser tell me about teaching a biology lesson? I could not have been more wrong – what I experienced in these tours will forever change how I view not only STEM education, but education in general.

At each tour, we got a chance to see the innovative research being conducted, but we also spent valuable time speaking with the engineers and scientists about their daily work. Some questions we asked were, “What are the most important skills you use every day?” “How often do you get to ‘just brainstorm’ about solving a problem?” “How often do you have to do technical writing?” “What do you love most about your job?”

Across the board, their answers consistently stated the following:

Communication and collaboration with a team is the most important part of their job
The best teams are diverse, open to new ideas, and flexible in their hierarchy of roles
Using critical thinking skills to solve problems happens every day
Their job is open book – the most important skill is HOW to find information and HOW to use it (they don’t have tests each week about the research they are performing)
Most earned a degree in a related field, but not necessarily the exact field they currently work in (much on the job training occurs)

I left these tours with an overwhelming desire to empower my students with these skills in my classroom. Education should be about student discovery, collaboration, and creation – not memorization and test-taking. Out students need to learn HOW to think, how to solve problems, and how to work in diverse groups.

How will you empower your students with these skills?

Images: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Using Your Community to Flip Your Class!

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

I’ll admit it – I live in a GREAT area for STEM education. Dayton, Ohio has a wide variety of resources from universities, industries, and government. Every year, I try to get at least few guest speakers into my classes and take my students on a few field trips so that they get a sense of what real world science looks like – it is often much different than they imagine!

But what if you don’t have these resources? Or what if you just can’t find the time for a guest speaker or field trip? With today’s technologies, many industries and universities are putting educational resources on the web for free. These videos are a great way to take the burden off of flipping your class. Who said YOU had to make every single video for your students? My new favorite is from “Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher Education” (SOCHE). Among many other great resources for both teachers and students, they have “SOCHE TV” which showcase short educational videos from local university leaders. I love this idea – students can see local educators making a difference in the world around them and then we can Skype with the speaker or even go visit them in their lab! Here are two talks in particular I will be using in my classroom. Both are from professors I have contacted to further the discussion with my students.

Why We Need an Energy Revolution, Bob Brecha, University of Dayton
Stem Cell Research – Medical Advance or Moral Peril, Dennis Sullivan, Cedarville University

SOCHE has a wide variety of resources – not just STEM, so please pass this along to your colleagues. I would love to hear how you use your local community to bring science to life in your classes – please share in the comments!

Is there a “Best Way” to Practice Project Based Learning?

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

If you’re anything like me, you spend the summer trying to relax with all of your might, but usually end up reflecting and changing your perspective on your classroom. These few months to sit back and truly recharge my classroom have opened my eyes to the value of project based learning (PBL). I have posted a few times about my “new” PBL classroom and provided the first few project templates I created. But, as I share these, I’m hesitant to set hard and fast rules about what your (PBL) classroom should look like. Granted, all PBL classes should have the following hallmarks: start with an intriguing driving question, scaffold learning for students, foster collaboration and communication among students (along with other 21st century skills), and have the project culminate with an authentic product that is shared with a public audience.

But there is absolutely no one-size fits all template for how this actually works in the classroom. Every teacher, every student, and every class is distinctly different and unique (and thank goodness for this!). Some schools have a plethora of resources (technology, community, academic, etc), while others barely have enough to buy pens and pencils. YOU have to make your PBL class work for you. You will not be perfect right away, you will stumble and second guess yourself – but that’s OK. When this inevitably happens to me in the next few months, I am going to ask myself just 1 question:

“Are my students engaged in a memorable and authentic learning experience that teaches
them both content and valuable skills?”

The answer, I hope, will be YES. The rest of it is simply details. Mind/Shift recently published a great article that I highly recommend about how to practice PBL along a continuum (see below). Trust, questioning, collaboration, content, knowledge, purpose are items you should always go back to when planning and implementing your project. Make sure your students have enough direction, but that they get to voice their choices and opinions as well. Make sure the students are collaborating, but are also held responsible for their individual work at times. And always make sure that the project is fun and engaging, but that it also has its roots in a real-world experience that makes the content come alive for them.

Chart: Effective PBL Continua by Peter Skillen & Brenda Sherry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

14 Gmail Labs Every ‘Google Apps for Education’ Teacher Needs

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

Google Apps for Education (GAFE) is arguably the best all-school approach to begin building 21st century skills. I recently attended a 4-day “boot camp” to get Google Certified and am excited to work with my school to transition to GAFE this year. GAFE is FREE, easy to use, and highly customizable – plus, many faculty and students already use Google in their personal life. However, many teachers find this change to be scary. Hopefully, I can provide some helpful hints to those teachers adjusting to GAFE. Today, I’ve got some great advice on making the most out of a teacher’s best friend: Gmail.

Just because you don’t see a certain feature in the default Gmail, doesn’t mean you can’t have it! Gmail Labs are features that are in beta testing – they might eventually graduate to full features, they might disappear altogether, or they might not always work properly. But this should not deter you from checking out these features that will make sending and receiving emails a bit easier and a bit more intuitive for you. To find these and other great labs, click the gear icon in the top right of your Gmail screen, then select “settings”. In the top toolbar select, “Labs” – now you can search for a specific lab or just browse away!

1. Canned Responses – Arguably the most valuable for us teachers, as it has a variety of functions. Save and then send your common messages using a button next to the compose form. Also automatically send emails using filters and create signatures for your emails (since this is NOT a function of Gmail). Used with Boomerang, you can set canned emails to be sent to students each week as reminders (ex: send a reminder every Sunday night to check the class schedule for the week).

2. Undo Send – Enough Said

3. Google Maps Preview in Mail - Shows Google Map previews of all the addresses found in an email.

4. Google Docs Gadget - Adds a box in the left column which displays your Google Docs. Shows recent docs, starred docs, and has fast search.

5. Google Docs Preview in Mail - Shows previews of documents, spreadsheets and presentations directly in the email when you receive any link to a Google Doc. Also gives an option to open directly in Google Docs.

6. Google Calendar Gadget - Adds a box in the left column which shows your Google Calendar. See upcoming events, locations, and details.

7. Create a Document - Allows you to create a Google Document from an email conversation or a new blank document if your keyboard shortcuts are enabled by hitting ‘g’ then ‘w’.

8. Preview Pane - Like to read your email and have an inbox overview, too? Here’s how to add a preview pane to Gmail and read messages in it, choosing a widescreen layout or a traditional one as you prefer.

9. Apps Search - Extends search beyond Gmail with Google Docs and Sites results. Apps Search will find the most relevant Docs and Sites and show them below Gmail search results.

10. Inserting Images - Allows you to insert images into a message body. You can upload and insert image files in your computer, or insert images by URLs. This lab will not work if you have offline enabled.

11. Background Send - Let Gmail send your mail while you move on to more important things. Just be sure to stay logged in until it’s all sent!

12. Auto-Advance - Automatically shows the next conversation instead of your inbox after you delete, archive, or mute a conversation. You can select whether to advance to the next or previous conversation in the “General” Settings page.

13. Default Text-Styling - Would you prefer Times New Roman to Arial, or perhaps large text to small text, in the e-mails you send out? Enable this lab, head over to the ‘General’ tab on the ‘Settings’ page, and change the default text styling to better suit your preferences.

14. Quick Links - Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more. Easy to use – just click “Add Quick Link” while you are on the page that you want to save for faster access later.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Embed Polls into your Presentations

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

Last week, I wrote about the educational possibilities of using case studies, especially in teaching science. Many of the case studies from The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science have great questions embedded in them – they are called “clicker cases” because some teachers have class sets of “clicker” devices to use.

Well, I don’t have these and when I used the Math department’s set, they were clunky and time-consuming to setup. I had to write and connect each question individually in PowerPoint. Poll Everywhere to the rescue!

With Poll Everywhere, you can create a poll “quiz” using their easy-to-use website interface and then simply embed it into your powerpoint. You could create a poll for each question or put multiple questions into each poll. Then the students can use their smartphones or other device to quickly answer the question. The results show up in PowerPoint in real time! I just finished modifying my first clicker case regarding pH and medicines with embedded polls – it is posted for you to download on the resources page.

Here are the instructions for embedding a poll into PowerPoint:

1) When viewing your poll, click the Download Slide link and chose the presentation software you use. The poll inside this slide can be copied into other presentations, used multiple times in a presentation, and resized like other PowerPoint objects. (I used the Mac Download app for PowerPoint for Mac. It was a little touchy – you have to go into presenter mode in order to add the slide)
2) On the My Polls list, you can download many polls at once as one deck. Remember, “.PPT” files are for PowerPoint 2003, and “.PPTX” files are for newer versions.

Any other ideas for using Poll Everywhere or case studies in science? Share them in the comments below!

Manage PBL or Flipped Class with MentorMob University

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

This summer has been quite a whirlwind for me – but in the most inspiring way. Through many workshops, conferences, and long discussions with my PLN, I have made the move to Project Based Learning (PBL) with most of my classes. I’ve shared my first few project templates, but one thing has been nagging me at the back of my mind – how am I going to manage this open-ended style of learning? A quality PBL unit needs direction, organization, a timeline, and most importantly, scaffolding of content to enhance student learning. I have gathered A TON of resources that students could use to learn the skills and content for each unit, but how am I going to “give” these resources to my students in a logical and efficient way?

Thank goodness I discovered MentorMob! The free version of MentorMob allows anyone to create a learning playlist on any topic. You can upload all types of content – videos, documents, links, etc, and viewers simply click their way through your “playlist”. The free version would be great for when I am training other teachers – it is a CLEAN and EASY TO USE system to deliver information in an interactive way. MentorMob is the perfect answer to “flipping” your professional development workshops. Time is valuable for every teacher, so this provides a way of training done in the comfort of your home at your own pace.

But an even better solution for my students and classroom is MentorMob University (MMU). MMU allows teachers to assign students to classes and then create unique units and playlists within those classes. My favorite MMU feature is the ability to create quizzes as a step in the playlist. I have created my playlist for my first PBL unit, “Are you what you eat?”, and am so excited for my students to start using it. I will be able to track my students’ progress through the playlist and see how well they are understanding the content through the quiz feature.

There are so many ways that you can use MMU in your class! Organize resources for student learning during their PBL unit, like I am doing. Allow students voice and choice – post many resources and they can choose which steps they would like to complete along their way in creating their final product. Manage your flipped class by posting your videos and quizzes over those videos in a playlist. Make a playlist for students to complete at home to prepare for an activity the following day – these playlists could provide great background information or expose and engage students in a new topic like Kim Darche did here (thanks, Kim!). Here are some other ways educators are using MMU.

I could probably go on for a few more pages on the great features of MentorMob, but I think the best way is to go explore on your own. Right now, you can get a 3-month free trial of MMU. MMU has many types of plans – from very basic for a single teacher to comprehensive for an entire institution. If your school is thinking about going to a 1:1 environment, I highly recommend MMU has an easy way for tech-timid teachers to incorporate technology into their classes.

How will YOU use MentorMob U? Please share in the comments below!

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

High Quality Scientific Inquiry Investigations from SEP

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

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Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP) from the University of California, San Francisco has a fantastic website with high quality inquiry science investigations. The Active Learning Lesson Plan Database is a repository of selected, SEP reviewed, quality hands-on lessons created by their classroom partnership teams and staff. Lessons range from grades K-12 and address a great variety of Science and Health topics. They had SEVEN PAGES of Biology lessons alone, and they are continuously updating their database with new lessons and labs.

Hopefully, you’ll get time to explore these inquiry-based explorations on your own, but if not, here are three labs that I will be using this year in my project based classroom:

Amylase – Exploring Digestion and Evolution through a Molecular Machine
This is a fantastic lesson that truly scaffolds the learning for the students. It begins with a teacher-led demo and hands-on activity to familiarize students with how enzymes work and how a lab protocol might be setup. The students are then asked to create their laboratory experiment to test an aspect of enzymes. It also incorporate multiple biological themes so students appreciate the connections across life.
How does the pH of an Environment Affect Bioavailability of Iron?In this lesson, students first examine the chemical reaction of two forms of iron, Fe⁰ and F⁺² with various pH conditions of either the stomach or intestine to determine how it gets absorbed and eliminated in the body. Then students isolate iron from the foods we eat (such as cereal) using a magnet to attract elemental iron or Fe⁰. I will use this is my Chemistry of Life unit to connect what we eat to how our body uses it. It also brings in important topics of water, pH, and experimental design.
Antigen Switching in Malaria
Wow – this lesson truly has it all! I will be using this in AP Biology to demonstrate important concepts like the immune system, micro-organisms, and evolution. It is a perfect culmination where students apply their knowledge about DNA, proteins, cells, ecological relationships, and evolution. I could also bring in Sickle Cell Anemia and how heterozygotes are immune to this nasty parasite! In this activity, students will model how the parasitic malaria protist Plasmodium falciparumevades the host immune response through a phenomenon called antigen switching. Specifically, slips of paper representing malaria-infected red blood cells will be used to demonstrate how random changes in the expression of Plasmodium proteins that display on the surface of human red blood cells helps the parasite avoid destruction by the host immune system.

From their website: SEP’s mission is to promote partnership between scientists and educators in support of high quality science education for K-12 students. To this end, SEP develops and implements programs with the following goals: 1) to support teaching and learning among teachers, students, and scientists; 2) to promote an understanding of science as a creative discipline, a process, and a body of integrated concepts; 3) to contribute to a deeper understanding of partnership; and 4) to provide models and strategies for other institutions interested in fostering partnerships between scientific and education communities.

Free image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Using Case Studies to Build Science Skills

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

“Stories are how we think. They are how we make of meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values.’ - Dr. Pamela Rutledge, Director, Media Psychology Research Center

Using the Flipped Classroom model and Project Based Learning, along with incorporating Bloom’s levels of thinking to my curriculum really opens up many possibilities for me to engage my students. One of my favorite ways to put the content into a real-world context and build essential 21st century and scientific practice skills is by using case studies. The use of case studies, especially in science, has picked up within the past few years and this has led to a wider availability of quality case studies written by experts and educators alike. Clyde Freeman Herreid, Ph.D. has written a great article about the history of case studies, various methods for implementing them in the classroom, and the impact they can have on student learning.

Two excellent sources of case studies are The National Center for Case Study Teaching at the University of Buffalo and Project Based Learning at the University of Delaware. Both sites are FREE, but require applying for access to teacher-only content. Let me know of other great ways to use case studies in your comments!

3 Reasons to LOVE HHMI Resources

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) offers a wide variety of resources for educators in STEM. Specifically, I enjoy using their Biointeractive site that offers activities and labs and their Holiday Lecture Series which feature noted researchers presenting on topics in their field. But sometimes it can be hairy navigating through their site. Ann Brokaw, a teacher at Rocky River High School in Ohio, has put together an AMAZING resource for science teachers: “Use Howard Hughes Medical Institute to Teach”. This document was specifically created for AP Biology teachers using the new curriculum framework, but the in-depth index of links and resources by theme is indispensable to any STEM teacher. The video clips, animations, classroom activities, virtual lab series, and interactive “click and learn” activities increase student understanding and engage students – two goals of mine for every class!

Here’s why I really LOVE this resource and will use it often in AP Biology:

1. It’s FREE and offers high-quality videos, animations, lessons, and activities
2. It is CURRENT. Unfortunately, I am still using the same AP Bio text I used in High School (7th edition Campbell), so I need to look elsewhere for current research on Biology topics. HHMI provides resources to expose students to cutting edge technologies and ideas, prompt students to process material, and explore/discuss concepts outside the confines of the textbook.
3. It is EASY TO USE. You can use entire lectures from the Holiday Lecture series (stream from web or request DVD copies for FREE) or you can pick and choose segments that you like. The animations and interactives are all stand-alone as well.

Letting Students Explore, Play & Discover with Exploratorium

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Amanda Ooten

Exploratorium isn’t just a museum, it’s an ongoing exploration of science that provides a vast collection of online interactives, activities, videos, and programs for educators, parents, scientists, and the naturally curious. You can really get lost on this site with all of the amazing things it has to offer!!

As I move towards project based learning, I find that I need to provide my students with many resources as they work their way towards their final product. I also am working on “giving up control” of the content and allowing my students more time to inquire and explore on their own. Many educators have recently discussed the notion of 20% “play” time built into their curriculum. Carolyn Durley (@okmbio) in her blog Flipperteach does an excellent job explaining the possibilities of this “tinkering” time – head on over to read her thoughts on this.

The hope is that as they use the multitude of provided resources, with me as their guide, they will learn the necessary content and skills required to complete their end product. Additionally, I hope that giving students options as to what resources they use and explore will further engage and motivate them to deeper understanding of the topic. Since there is so much to “explore” on this site, I’ll highlight some of the extra cool features that I plan on using in my Biology classes:

Under “Living Things” the Cell Explorer interactive does a nice job explaining the connections between the cell, energy, food, cellular respiration, photosynthesis, and protein function. In my Energy unit, their final project will be to create an infographic answering the question, “Where does all of our food ultimately come from and what does our bodies do with it”. This interactive will really help them with these big picture concepts.
Under “Living Things” the feature “Stem Cells: Cells with Potential” is a great resource for my PBL Cells Unit on Stem Cells. This article is embedded with great microscope images and videos, an interview with a stem cell researcher, and graphics explaining how stem cells work.
Under “Living Things” the videos “Energy from Death” show beetles consuming both a sparrow and a mouse in a matter of days. The videos are short and no further information is provided, but these would be an excellent engager for starting a unit on food chain or energy transfer.
The Microscope Imaging Stations Classroom Explorations are great virtual labs that utilize high quality microscope images to teach concepts like cell structure, fruit fly phenotypes, and zebrafish development. This would be great to use if you don’t have the equipment or time set it up!
The DNA Files Hands On Workshops is a series of four workshops geared towards educating teachers about DNA. These are great FREE activities with detailed explanations for use. Although they are supposed to be used for professional development, they can certainly be tweaked for your students!