Effecting Change at School and District Levels

As a science leader, I am trying to create change in my school and my district so that others will see how important STEM education is for all of our students.  I have started this change at my school by becoming the outdoor lab coordinator.  I make sure that each grade level gets outside to use the lab at least once a year by having my 6th graders teach the other grades a lesson outside.  I have also convinced my grade to let me teach science all day making sure that my students get science every day.  We have also started a science club and summer science camp as well as adopted a hands on science curriculum.
The common barrier that I have to overcome is that fact that the big push is for language arts and math.  Even though science is test by the state in 6th grade it is not tested in all grades and it does not effect our schools grade.  This means that it does not have as much priority as language arts and math.  I am continually pushing for others to see science's importance in our school systems.

WHERE is our Sputnik?

Just like the movie, Waiting for "Superman" implies that students are waiting for a better education system.  We are all waiting for a nation that is really focusing on education.  Thomas Friedman discusses our nations priorities in What's Our Sputnik?.  He describes how it took the Soviet Union launching Sputnik for the US to kick it into high gear in education.

Today we are being compared with other nations in education and we keep coming up short.  I feel that we are spending so much time, money, and energy fighting in other countries that we are not fighting our own battles at home.  It is wonderful that we are trying to help others.  I think about going on mission trips yet on the way to the airport we pass someone who is homeless and needs something to eat on our home territory.

So what are we waiting for?  What will it take to spend more time, money, and energy on education?  We continue to see the test scores but when will the cavalry ride in and save the day?  There are students from other countries coming and getting high paying jobs due to their push to excel.  We need more of that.  Are we too comfortable in the place that we are in? When we will see that we need to push harder to reach our goals?  I'm not sure.  Many teachers are making the shift to real world applicable STEM teaching.  We are focusing more on science, technology, engineering, and math so that we can make those advances but society has to be behind that push.

I'm not sure what our "Sputnik" will be all I know is that we need to figure it out soon before we are further behind that what we can come back from.

Friedman, T. L. (2010, January 17). What’s our Sputnik? [Op-Ed]. The New York Times [Late Edition (East Coast)], p. WK.8.

Modeling the Earth

The basic idea of my model lesson is that I used a large Earth ball to model how the movement of the Earth affects life on Earth. We talked about tilt, rotation, and revolution.  The hardest part was that this was suposed to be a review for the students and I found they didn't remember many of the things that we had already talked about.  I was happy to see that after this activity they were able to fill out a concept map about the different movements and connect them to the coresponding affects.  I think that it worked even better because the students were actually parts of the model and moving the Earth themselves.

Natural Disasters

The news is a great way to bring forward some science topics.  It is amazing, we could be talking about hurricanes or earthquakes in class and it might be pulling teeth to get the students to talk about it.  Yet if we have a disaster like the recent earthquake in Japan, the students will be talking about it for days.  That is one way to get their attention.  They love to bring in tidbits of information that they learned on the news.  We recently had a speaker from The New Community Project http://www.newcommunityproject.org/ the students were enthralled by the stories that the speaker conveyed to them about the hardships that people go through, throughout the world.  The students genuinly wanted to help, so we collected aluminum cans and then turned the cans in for money to send to these causes.  It was a great way to bring these happenings into reality for my students.  I wonder if maybe once a 9 weeks the students would bring in current events of natural disasters and then as a class they could decided where they would want to send the aluminum can money.  Then if we could find a contact and maybe skype with students in that area that would make the experience that much more memorable.

Backward Design Lesson

I was really excited to implement my backward design lesson plan this week.  I felt that this was one of the more successful starts to my project based learning units this year.  The students were engaged and interested in the topic and the real world content.  They were also excited that their work would be submitted for a contest, through which they could earn money.  Students gained a good understanding of the different types of energy that we use in our school, town, and state.  They also looked at how these energy uses effect our environment and how we can decrease our effects on the environment in the future.  Students were able to use this information to start their newspaper articles by the end of the lesson.  This showed me that they understood the concepts and what was expected of them.

            I really liked the real world aspects and the motivation that the contest provided.  Students were interested in the topic and I was able to give them many relevant websites to research their information.  I felt that the original website from scholastic was a great way to give the students background information on the different types of energy before they researched their uses in our school, town, or state.  We found that the nearby electricity companies also had valuable information on their websites as well.

            The portion of the lesson that was not as successful was using the worksheets to start off with information.  Both worksheets were jam packed with information and the students had trouble understanding some of the questions.  I think next year I will cut some parts of the informational worksheets out and reword the questions so that they can more easily use the information given to them.  I would also like to cut down the worksheets so that they can spend more time on the interactive scholastic and Duke Energy websites.  I think that if each student from the group has more time to explore those websites they will gain more individual knowledge than they did through the worksheets.  Many students enjoy the computers more and wanted more time to research on the computers so I think that this is the best way to increase understanding before producing the product.

            The backward design process helped me to focus on the standards that I wanted to achieve first.  I had an idea for the project earlier but by looking at the standards I was able to cut out some aspects of the project and focus on the pieces that pertained more to the 6^th grade science standards.  Then I was able to build my lesson with these standards in mind the whole time.  I have found as a new teacher I would use the science book to lead instruction sometimes then realize afterwards that there were whole sections that did not cover any standards that I needed.  By focusing on the goal first I am able to save time and come up with a more productive lesson.

Copy of student newspaper article (Williams, T. & Filek, R. 2011)

 

Why do we die if our cells are constantly replacing themselves?

This is a question that came to me while learning more about how cells reproduce.  I always felt that our cells just started to shut down and in turn our organs and other things.  As I learned more about cell reproduction I noted that the cells are constantly being replaced and they are checked for problems as well.  So why do we end up dying?  Unfortunately my question was not answered on ask a scientist but with the help of my colleagues responses and some searching on the internet, I believe that I have found the answer.

Just as when we get sick, there are genetic and environmental factors that effect our health.  Our cells can be effected by environmental factors such as radiation or they are simply getting older.  When they make a copy of themselves they are bringing these factors over.  The radiation or other environmental factors have aged or altered the cell in some way or the cell that was copied is an older version than the cell was when it was first made so the copy is an older copy.  Eventually these copies get older and older or more and more effected by the environment that all the copies are effected.  So we are not constantly making copies of the original new cell it is always slightly older or environmentally effected eventually leading to the death of the organism.

Yahoo Answers (2011) Yahoo answers: why do we die of old age? Retrieved from http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100311214000AAeutl4

Jordan Coffed (2011) SCIE-6662S-2 Investigating the living world: week 2 discussion board post. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=4889695&Survey=1&47=6876975&ClientNodeID=403157&coursenav=1&bhcp=1

Dr. Samson Lyman (2011) SCIE-6662S-2 Investigating the living world: week 2 discussion board post. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=4889695&Survey=1&47=6876975&ClientNodeID=403157&coursenav=1&bhcp=1

Web 2.0

Web 2.0

I am really excited to learn new ways to presents ideas.  I also enjoy giving these ideas to my students, who are always looking for alternative and technological ways to present their projects.  I have exposed my students to prezi.com but have not had time to become familiar with it myself.  I have gone through the tutorial but that is about it.  So far I really like prezi.  It is a fun new twist on power points and I feel that it keeps the students engaged while they are creating and presenting.  I really like that I can make just one login for all of my classes and then students just keep all of their work there.  Also they can then work on presentations outside of school because they can access it at home through the internet.  I have had some problems with prezi in that sometimes the website is down.  When this happens there is no way for my students to work on or present their presentation.  Hopefully this is something that the company is working on to make it reliable.  Even with this I would really like to continue to learn more about prezi.com and use it for my project during this class. http://prezi.com/  

The other type of technology that I explored was the museum box.  I really like the idea behind the presentation.  I feel that if my students look at their presentation as a museum box it will help them to better organize their ideas.  The problem that I had with it was that there was no tutorial like there was with prezi so it was hard to try and get started and figure out what the end product would look like.  Also you have to register your school and they have to call the school and accept it.  On top of that you need a separate login for each student. I am hoping that I could just come up with one login for everyone as setting this up for 80-100 students would take a while.  http://museumbox.e2bn.org/