College Professors & Students

Interactive eBooks+ Professional Collection

Interactive eBooks+ Professional provide an in-depth refresher of content knowledge to K-12 educators of science. Best for generalists or those teaching out of field, learners experience animations, simulations, and videos that bring content to life, while pop-up review questions help underscore the most crucial points of knowledge. A NSTA certificate of completion is provided to users with a passing score of 70% (or higher) in the eBook+ final assessment.

Journals

*Students have access to digital journals only

NSTA publishes four grade-range-specific journals as well as a journal which bridges in-school and out-of-school science teaching and learning.

• Science & Children (Elementary)
• Science Scope (Middle School)
• The Science Teacher (High School)
• Journal of College Science Teaching (Postsecondary)
• Connected Science Learning (Informal)

Daily Do Lesson Plans

Daily Dos are sensemaking tasks teachers and parents can use to engage their students in authentic, relevant science learning.  Students actively try to figure out how the world works (science) or how to design solutions to problems (engineering) using the science and engineering practices. Engaging in these practices requires that students be part of a learning community, of classmates or family, to be able to share and evaluate ideas, give and receive critique, and reach consensus.

Professional Learning Units

NSTA Professional Learning Units (PLU) are bite-sized, self-paced, asynchronous short courses that educators can use to improve their practice, enrich students’ learning, and increase equitable participation in the classroom. Regardless of your schedule or location, you can earn a NSTA PLU certificate—that could be used towards two credit hours of professional learning—when it’s convenient for you!

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Monthly Professional Learning Web Seminars

NSTA Web Seminars are live professional learning experiences that use online learning technologies to allow participants to interact with nationally acclaimed experts, NSTA Press authors, and scientists, engineers, and education specialists from NSTA partner organizations.

View upcoming web seminars

Increasing Science Teacher Candidates’ Ability To Become Lifelong Learners Through A Professional Online Learning Community

Veal, W., Malone, K., Wenner, J.A., Odell, M., & Hines, S.M. (2019). Increasing science teacher candidates’ ability to become lifelong learners through a professional online learning community. Innovations in Science Teacher Education, 4(1).

This article describes the use of an online professional learning community within the context of K-8 science education methods courses. The article describes the unique usage of the learning community with preservice teachers at different certification levels within the context of five distinct universities. While each approach is different there exists commonalities of usage. Specifically, the site is used to develop mastery of science content, exposure to pedagogical content knowledge, and classroom activities that focus on authentic science practices. Each case provides specific details of how the preservice teachers were immersed into a learning community that can serve them throughout their teaching career.

Teacher Learning in the Digital Age

Online Professional Development in STEM Education

Byers, A., & Mendez, F. (2016). Blended professional learning for science educators: The NSTA learning center. In C. Dede, A. Eisencraft, K. Furmin, & A. Hartley (Eds.), Teacher Learning in the Digital Age: Online Professional Development in STEM Education. Boston: Harvard Press.

The purpose of the NSTA Learning Center is to enhance the learning of teachers by providing a suite of tools, resources, and opportunities that support their long term growth based on their unique learning needs and preferences within a collaborative learning environment. This chapter provides an overview of our professional learning community platform and the various consumption models that support personalized individual learning for self-directed learners as part of a large open professional network, as well as those schools, districts, and universities working with groups of educators (in-service and per-service) collaborating in concert with each other as part of a cohort. A robust recognition system that involves social networking and gamification strategies, such as badges and micro-credentials are discussed and two university mini-case studies are presented. With over 180,000 users, 70,000 user-generated posts across 8,000 topics in our forums, 72,000 user resources uploaded across users’ personal libraries, over 17,000 user generated public collections shared, and 70,000 badges awarded to over 164,000 individuals, the NSTA Learning Center is a robust professional learning network and platform that seeks to address the scale needed to reach our 2 million teachers of science across the US.