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.
Recently, I’ve added Twitter to my toolkit. At first, I must admit, tweeting seemed like a pleasant diversion, but I’m experiencing its potential for professional development and communication. The other evening, I “attended” an event that began with a podcast of background information on a specific topic. Then the participants (several hundred from across the country) began conversations by tweeting questions/answers, observations, comments, and suggesting websites for further information. I had another person with me during the event, so we had the best of both—social media and face-to-face interactions. How did I learn about this podcasting/tweeting event? From Facebook (another item in my toolkit)—not bad for someone who started a career in science with a slide rule.
More on Twitter as a classroom, communication, or PD tool:

• 10 Steps for Educators New to Twitter… from the Justin Tarte Life as an Educator blog
• Twitter—Expanding our classroom—shrinking the world from the Free Technology for Teachers blog
• Why Twitter Is a Teacher’s Best Tool from GOOD
• How to Use Twitter to Grow Your PLN from Edutopia
• Twitter: Not Just About Ham Sandwiches from Educational Leadership
• A Twitteraholic’s Guide to tweets, hashtags, and all things Twitter from Edublogger
• 10 Commandments of Twitter Etiquette from Vadim Lavrusik’s blog

Be on the alert for NSTA’s next tweetchat—join in (or just lurk) and learn.
 
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bekkchen/441704675/sizes/m/in/photostream/

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 way he assigned homework.

One of the major changes that I made this year was to switch to using individual student blogs as the centerpiece of student assessment (the other major change was to implement standards-based grading). I started using student blogs for a number of reasons including:

1. I was tired of grading worksheets with the same copied answers on them.
2. I realized that these worksheets weren’t always helpful in learning content, and in fact, much of the time they got in the way of learning.
3. Student in my classes have access to a MacBook cart whenever they are in my classroom and we have fantastically dependable wireless internet connectivity for these laptops (yay tech support!).
4. Blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress are free.
5. I’m increasingly wary of multiple choice anything as real assessment and wanted students to write more.
6. I wanted students to have a permanent, online record of their achievement throughout the year, not some pile of papers shoved in a binder (or trash can).
7. I wanted students to have an audience for their work that would include each other, their families, the community, and the world.

Ludwig continues,

So how did we use the blogs? They became the go-to location to post assignments for me to read and grade. For a week or two, though, I operated a lot like I did last year, posting assignments on Edmodo and using its great assignment features to have students turn things in online, as well as posting them to their blogs. I realized that this was a duplication of effort and soon instead of sending out “assignments” in Edmodo, I just sent files and links as “notes.” This meant that these resources no longer came with a due date and that I was not using Edmodo to see who turned in which assignments.

Read the full post here.

“I know what I mean but I can’t ‘splain it.” I used to hear that from my middle school students in physical science, especially on essay questions. Sometimes the concepts are indeed hard to ‘splain in words. Visuals and observations of real events can make the concepts more real for students.

For example, a recent NPR blog Cinderella’s Ball, This Time With Pendulums had a video of a set of 15 pendulums, each a different length. When released simultaneously, watch what happens as a camera placed on the side of the apparatus captures the motion. What’s happening here? Hmm. I wondered what it would look like from the front. And sure enough, there was a blog comment with the same question and a response with a link to a video of a slightly different setup but with the camera in a different position. I checked out the creator of the video, Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations.  The site has resources for teaching concepts in physics and mathematics, but I spent the most time looking at the videos. These are short and to the point—great discussion starters or bellringers too.
Concepts in chemistry can be hard to understand, too. Middle School Chemistry from the American Chemical Society can be helpful. This series of lesson plans uses the 5E framework for lessons on matter, changes of state, density, periodic table/bonding, the water molecule, and chemical changes. The lessons include hands-on activities, simulations and animations, and student handouts.

Spring migration brings additional bird species back to their nesting range and in numbers that children can easily observe. There have been plenty of American Robins pulling up worms from the rain-soaked ground. And the children discovered a Robin’s nest in the shrubby tree on the playground, not under our noses but just above them. Your class can become citizen scientists by sending information about the nests they find to NestWatch, a nest-monitoring project developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in collaboration with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and funded by the National Science Foundation. Begin by having your students observe and draw the nest without disturbing it.
The interest in bird nest building grew when a child brought in a nest with eggs that had been downed by storm winds, and unattended by the parents for days. (Note that the US Fish and Wildlife Service administers the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and that states also regulate possession of nests.)    We looked at it closely but did not touch it.
Then we tried building a nest using sticks, grass, and pottery clay. The almost three-year-olds loved getting into the clay, and found the nest building too difficult to work on for very long.
It’s amazing how many species of birds can be seen in one location. Lisa Gardiner wrote about looking for birds in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with a team from BirdSleuth who were leading an NSTA National Conference workshop called Exploring Birds and Citizen Science. Birds hadn’t caught her attention the first time she walked the route on her way to the workshop, “Yet once I was looking for birds they seemed to be everywhere.” National and area NSTA conferences are great places to get support for teaching science in early childhood, learn some fascinating science content to share with your students, and to get “how-to” tips for teaching. I always come home with new resources—materials, websites, and contacts—and renewed enthusiasm. Maybe one of my or your students will be inspired like Noah Strycker who wrote about his experience studying Adelaide penguins in the Antarctic in his book, “Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica.”   Strycker became interested in bird watching when an elementary school teacher pointed out chickadees and grosbeaks on a bird feeder outside the classroom window. Read his blog to keep up with his travels along the Pacific Crest Trail which he kicked off this week, on May 19, 2011. I wonder what birds he will see?
Peggy