Whether it’s a riverbank, a lakeshore, or along an ocean or bay, the water is a popular vacation place in the summer. But what if your classroom could be extended to study these places during the school year?
Last fall, on one of the NSTA listservs, Charlie Lindgren from Massachusetts described a project his class was starting. They were studying sand and hypothesizing how and why it might differ from one location to another. The problem was – how to get sand to study. The teacher requested members of the listserv to send samples (he even offered to reimburse postage). This spring, he gave us an update on the project, which was based on a presentation he saw an at NSTA conference.
As a result of the online request, his students received samples from up and down the east coast. The results are described on the Atlantic Coast Sand Lab site. If you click on the locations on the map, you will go to an individual page for each location. By clicking on the “Return to Data” link, you will come to a table with all of the results (use the number in the far left column to see the information on that sample). The student handouts that were used in the project are available at the top of the page.
This is not a complicated website with a lot of bells and whistles, but it represents an authentic use of the technology by students and their teacher. In his listserv message, Charlie described some of the successes and shortcomings of the project and the plans for next year. The plan includes increasing the number of sand samples to include the west coast and freshwater riverbanks and lakeshores from the Appalachian region. He is requesting feedback on the project (electronically, of course) and is looking for additional samples. You can email him to provide any suggestions or for directions on submitting samples.
Here are some other resources on sand:

• Sand website from Pasadena City College
• Sand Lab booklet from the New Jersey Marine Sciences Consortium
• Sands of the World from a school in Rhode Island.
• In NSTA’s Science Objects the earth science objects have several on rocks, including sedimentary rocks.

For many teachers, the word “notebook” conjures up an image of a folder or binder in which students attach lab reports, homework, class handouts and notes, tests and quizzes, and/or completed worksheets. The students are given a list of required documents and the required order in which they should appear in the notebook. The notebooks are graded periodically on how complete they are and on whether the documents are in the required order. Teachers would tell the students to “study” from them. At the end of the school year, some students would take them home; others would casually discard them as they cleaned out their desks or lockers.
However, there’s a lot of talk about going beyond these simple organizational strategies for archives or document repositories to helping students create a more useful and personalized notebook, one that won’t be tossed away at the end of the year. These approaches recognize the importance of helping students become better at recording and analyzing data and at using writing to reflect on and communicate what they are learning.
There are many teacher websites that list the required elements for class notebooks (just Google “science notebook” for some examples). But here are some ideas that you can use to revise your class notebook activity:

• I’d start with looking at the NSTA publication Using Science Notebooks in Elementary Classroomby Michael Klentschy. Don’t be put off by the title if you’re a secondary teacher. The concepts are the same, and the strategies would be useful if your students are not used to organizing their thoughts and notes for themselves. There are many examples of students work, and I was blown away by what these little ones are doing and thinking! You can even read a sample chapter online.
• Science Notebooks in K-12 Classrooms produced by the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership in Washington state is a an excellent resource, with lots of examples of student work, templates, and documents – including many in Spanish.
• Using Science Notebooks K-8 is a teacher resource provided by the Tucson Unified School District with suggestions for using notebooks, their benefits and advantages, and LOTS of examples of student work.
• If you’re an NSTA member, you can download several articles for FREE from NSTA’s Science Store including Science Notebook Essentials by Michael Klentschy.
• The Scientist’s Notebook Toolkit from the East Bay Collaborative in Rhode Island is another resource that is rich in suggestions and examples.
• The Interactive Notebook Tutorial was designed by a California teacher to acquaint her students with creating and using notebooks. But teachers can learn, too.
• The ERIC Digest, Science Notebooks: Tools For Increasing Achievement Across the Curriculum, provides a rationale for using science notebooks and discusses their effect on learning.

One thing that I like about many of these books, articles, and online resources is their inclusion of lots of examples of students work. Secondary teachers will be amazed at the depth of knowledge expressed by younger students! And I’m sure we’ll think: If these students can do it, so can mine! But I suspect that these students did not catch on to a new approach to notebooks right away, especially if they have had many years of explicit directions on exactly what papers and information to put in a notebook. Their teachers had to provide lots of modeling, feedback, and persistence to get to the point where the notebook is an integral part of their science classes. But any teacher I’ve talked to about these notebooks says that it is worth the effort.
Of course, if students don’t see a useful purpose for their notebooks, the notebooks become just another item to carry around. By following up on activities, revisiting past assignments or notes, and using the notebooks during projects or open-ended assessments, students can see the value of having a notebook.

It’s summer and maybe some of us are involved in writing/revising the science curriculum for our schools. Rather than just creating a laundry list of topics to be “covered” based on a textbook table of contents, you might be looking for some resources that combine content with inquiry processes, that are a comprehensive set of classroom activities with materials and multimedia components, and that include references to your state’s standards.
I recently came across the materials available through the Office of Science Education at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The main page has many resources and is worth a look, but I was impressed by what I found when I clicked on the Curriculum Supplements link. These are arranged by grade level (high school, middle school, and elementary levels). You can request a print copy for some of them, but the complete resource is available on line for all of them.
These are called “supplements,” but these are more complete that most resources I’ve seen! Each one has a content summary, and the web versions have suggestions for classroom use and links to multimedia activities. The teacher’s guide has background information on the topic, a wealth of classroom resources including a student manual, and all of the materials can be downloaded as PDF files. The student activities link leads to the multimedia and animations that complement the print and web-based materials.
Another neat feature is the alignment of these supplements to the state standards. On the page listing the supplements for each level, there is a link to the “state standards” for each one. I clicked on my state for one of the supplements, and not only were the relevant science standards listed, but also the relevant standards in mathematics, health, and communications!
Some of the topics in the high school supplements include cell biology and cancer, infectious diseases, human genetics, the brain, and cellular/molecular biology. The middle school topics include inquiry, healthy behaviors, the skeletal and muscular systems, the brain, mental illness, and chemicals in the environment. The elementary topic (right now there is only one) is on teeth and oral health.
Many of these individual supplements have been added to SciLinks over the years. They rate highly in the SciLinks rubrics for design and resource integration. It’s great to see all of the NIH resources in one place! Why re-create what you can get here?

Teachers (and administrators) love so see the word “free.” FREE in this case stands for Federal Resources for Excellence in Education. This website, maintained by the U.S. Department of Education, has links to hundreds of web-based resources, categorized by subject area. These sites are submitted by U.S. agencies, such as NASA, NOAA, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, most of the cabinet agencies, the National Archives, the National Park Service, the Census Bureau, and a number of others.
This is a goldmine of excellent resources. For example, the latest updates in science include a video on nanotechnology, an overview of NASA missions, a lesson idea for helping students understand the concept of a “planet,” and a lesson idea in which elementary students create a system for filtering gray water. But I also enjoy looking at the sites in other content areas. The newest topics include teaching with spreadsheets, excerpts from the diaries of 19th century pioneers traveling to the Pacific coast, and an overview of the artwork of M.C. Escher. All without leaving my laptop!
Rather than trying to remember to check the site for new updates, you can subscribe to a RSS feed (directions are on the site), or you can get on the mailing list and receive an e-mail message each month with links to the newest sites added.

What do you get when you combine knowledge, passion, experience, and some fantastic graphics? A friend sent me the link to a TED video of Robert Ballard’s talk on Exploring the Ocean’s Hidden Worlds. I thought I was fairly knowledgeable, but during his riveting talk, it became apparent how little we actually know about the seafloor. As he states, we know more about the surface of the moon than about the floor of the ocean. People enjoying a summer day at the beach have very little knowledge or appreciation of what lies beyond (and below). This is a frontier that we should be exploring, for the resources that lie below the ocean floor as well as for the study of the fantastic life forms there. This video is well worth 20 minutes of your time or your students’ time (yes, it can be downloaded).
The Internet has many other resources, but you can find relevant ones on exploring the ocean floor by logging into SciLinks and using the keyword ocean. Regardless of the grade level, you’ll find websites that are interesting, even if you don’t live near the oceans. Some of my favorites include Ocean Explorer from NOAA (which has archives of explorations starting with 2001), Dive and Discover: Expeditions to the Sea Floor from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (I’ve spent a lot of time poking around this one, including the teacher section), and Sea Floor Mapping from NOAA (this game-like activity is designed for younger elementary students).
To increase your own background knowledge, check out NSTA’s Science Objects. These free (yes, free) online resources for teachers are self-directed and provide relevant information on many topics. Related to oceanography, you’ll find topics in Earth Science such as Plate Tectonics (I’ve done these five Objects myself) and Oceans Effect on Climate and Weather (a series of four Objects). Also look at the Life Science list. The four Coral Reef Ecosystem objects review the physical and biological factors in the formation of coral reefs.
The part that I appreciated the most in Ballard’s presentation was his plea for more “jaw-dropping” moments in our schools (he mentions middle schools in particular), when our students are inspired by scientific learning and explorations and begin to make connections between this knowledge and their own lives. Having been a middle school teacher, I can agree that this enthusiastic age is the time for laying the groundwork for this sense of wonder and for an interest in further study in the sciences, whether as a career or an area of personal interest. What happens to the sense of curiosity and wonder of younger students as they progress through school?

In previous entries, I’ve mentioned the online, collaborative projects that are part of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s (CLO) Citizen Science program. Well, they’ve done it again! The Spring 2008 issue of Birdscope, (an excellent newsletter with an online version), describes the newest CLO project, CamClickr. After 9 years of nest-camming, the Lab has collected more than 7 million images from nest box cameras from across the country. These images are valuable data to answer research questions such as How do feeding rates change throughout the day? How do feeding rates change as the babies grow? What is the frequency of feeding by males as compared to females? But at this point, the images are not organized and categorized. This is where the Camclickr (yes, that’s the way they spell it) project fits in.
The Camclickr site is designed to provide a way for anyone to assist with this project, and you don’t have to be an ornithologist or bird watcher to participate. So I decided to give it a try. After logging in (you can create a login or use an existing login from another CLO project), you launch the Camclickr. You get a screen with 9 photographs and a sidebar with the categories, which are based on the presence/absence of adults in the nest. You drag and drop the photo into the appropriate category. It’s like creating a scrapbook or photo album. The site keeps track of how many you do each session, and you can review the categories to change any entries that are not correct. Save and Logout enters your work into the database. It took me a little while to make out what I was looking at, because the photos I had were from the top of the birdhouse. Each photo has a location, date, and time stamped on it, and you can enlarge the picture to get a better view. The photos can also be printed. After categorizing a set of photos, you then move to “Level 2” in which you are given your scrapbook, and for each photo in it you describe the behavior of the adults and the nestlings (from a menu). The site keeps track of what level you’re on and how many “points” you have earned. There are links to live nest cams and other resources. Right now, it’s in the beta testing version, so you and your students can be in from the beginning of the real-world, authentic project.
For more information on birds, go to SciLinks and use the keyword “birds” and your grade level. You’ll find a variety of sites, including Migratory Bird Center from the National Zoo, Aves from the University of Michigan, and Birds, Birds, Birds from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Doesn’t it seem like there’s always something new in technology? How can we keep up with what’s going on? I’ve found a resource that can be very helpful: TipLine – Gates’ Computer Tips. This award-winning blog is written by Jim Gates (no relation to Bill), who is a technology trainer/coach and a former teacher. I’ve added this to my Google Reader, so that every day, when Jim adds a brief “tip” it appears! And you can check out the archive (dating back to 2005) to find other topics of interest.
He notes that reading blogs is a new form of professional development. Yes, there are a lot of trivial blogs, but check out the list he has. Fortunately, he is willing to pass along what he learns to the rest of us. Now, if there were only more hours in the day to read these!

Several issues of NSTA journals this year have had an assessment theme, including the April/May issue of Science & Children and the January issue of Science Scope. I recently became aware of another assessment project called MOSART, which stands for a mouthful: Misconceptions-Oriented Standards-Based Assessment Resources for Teachers. I must admit I get a little skeptical when I see a project name that manages to incorporate multiple descriptors into its name (and I’ve written many of these myself!), but this one is well worth a visit!
These assessments, for grades K-12 in the physical and earth/space sciences (no life science/biology as of this date), are designed to help you determine what your students understand and what misconceptions they bring to class. The project is sponsored by a National Science Foundation grant to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Note: check out the other terrific resources on their site for professional development and content background). The assessments are different than many multiple choice tests, in that the questions are not designed to test students’ recall of facts. The questions are based on the NSES standards and allow students to think their way through the items.
But you can’t just download the tests and put them to your file cabinet! Users must register (free) and complete a brief orientation. It’s online and it took me about 30-40 minutes (mostly because I wanted to see all of the video segments!). This tutorial is one of the best things about this project, It guides you through a discussion of what misconceptions are, how these tests let you probe your students thinking, how/when to use the assessments (e.g., at the beginning of a course, or as a pre/post test), what you can learn from looking at how many and which students chose which distractors, and how to interpret the results. As you can probably tell, this is not the type of assessment to use for a “grade.”
After the tutorial, you then have access to all of the tests, which are emailed to you in PDF format, along with guidelines for interpreting the results. I looked at a K-4 physical science test (which is to be given to students in grades 5-6). The download included two versions of the test and a key that goes far beyond a traditional answer key to help you to analyze the results in terms of student (mis)understandings.
The end of the school year is hectic, but I could see myself using this during the last week of school as a “puzzle” exercise for the students (the grades are turned in by then anyway). Then, over the summer I would look carefully at the responses to determine what I might include or change next year. I’m sure the students’ responses would be interesting!