Knowing science teachers like I do, I’m not surprised to see that they express a gamut of emotions and have some really innovative ideas about how to prepare for going back to school. A completely unscientific survey of the Twittersphere reveals a few gems that may help science teachers everywhere—or at least bring a smile to a few faces!

ICYMI: Teachers Gear up For #NGSS http://t.co/Z3ztxPrdhZ @TdiShelton #ngsschat

— Melissa Stugart (@MelissaStugart) August 14, 2015

The cats do not understand getting ready for the start of the school year. They have closed my laptop & are revolting.

— Alyson Beecher (@alybee930) August 15, 2015

Released the spider at school by my room. #spider#spiders#Bugs#insects#scienceisawesome#science… https://t.co/kNGLmfKllz

— Adam Taylor (@2footgiraffe) August 14, 2015

 

Lights, Camera, Learn: What are Engineers? #pictureperfectscience #nsta #studio214 http://t.co/Mf0vAxfJBu

— Andrea Parson (@ParsonAndrea) August 16, 2015

A. Simpson (Keheley) & C. Garvin (Vaughan) at Mickelson ExxonMobil Teachers Academy! #stemcobb #MEMTA2015 pic.twitter.com/RGhuphkQl7

— STEM Cobb (@STEMcobb) July 31, 2015

I need to admit something….. I am an NSTA nerd. 🙂 @NSTA #summer #teacherlife pic.twitter.com/ymGzwdEzao

— Holly Neill (@homelifescience) August 14, 2015

“So it appears that now I’m a chemistry teacher…” Have any advice or tips for this teacher? http://t.co/TehutOhdsB #chemchat #NGSS

— IT’S ABOUT TIME® (@ItsAboutTimeEDU) August 14, 2015

A teensy supermassive black hole on @nytimes Summer of Science series: http://t.co/1YWd6l0THY by @overbye#scichatpic.twitter.com/ulb9BCw27s

— Kim Kowal Arcand (@kimberlykowal) August 15, 2015

Tips for the First Days of School: The August issue of Book Beat is full of them! http://t.co/DlUP27WQU6#NSTApic.twitter.com/AXdGtGuhhd

— NatSciTeachAssoc (@NSTA) August 15, 2015

A #science discussion students will love: What “Inside Out” Got Wrong http://t.co/LUGDMoYm7W#scichat

— Curriculet (@curriculet) August 14, 2015

Set classroom culture with a classroom pledge #TchTogether http://t.co/VTuWLujrGq pic.twitter.com/ZEZqzxE5iS

— Teaching Channel (@TeachingChannel) August 15, 2015

Education-focused media: Come to @NASA_Johnson Sept. 15-16 to learn about #YearInSpace. http://t.co/ZUe7oWusl9 pic.twitter.com/6DgQpHCDfF

— Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) August 15, 2015

 

Already registered #NSTA15 Reno! Can’t wait https://t.co/qcuBEwEnE8

— Jen Gutierrez (@jengutierrez18) July 26, 2015

< p dir="ltr" lang="en">NEW: Teach Climate Change Through Positive Action. #scichat #NSTA #ActOnClimate @naesp #mschat http://t.co/i0YibL0duA pic.twitter.com/aTp1jbheJP

— MiddleWeb (@middleweb) August 16, 2015

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

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We’re a 1:1 school, and all of my students have access to iPads in class. I’m thinking of transitioning from hard-copy notebooks to electronic notebooks. My students are not thrilled with this.  —R., New York

In a previous blog/column, Mary Morgan, a science teacher at Belton High School in Belton, Texas, shared her thoughts on interactive science notebooks. She also has experience with electronic formats, and here she shares her thoughts on electronic notebooking:

I have used INBs (Interactive Notebooks) for the last eight of the nine years I’ve been teaching, for all levels of biology. I’ve toyed with the idea of an electronic interactive notebook, (my school is a 1:1 iPad school), but I just can’t see myself completely transitioning to full iPad interactive notebooks anytime soon.

First, I’ve searched for a program or app that would help students organize the notebook, but I can’t find anything I like. (If I could find something I would certainly give it a pilot run with one of my classes—My pre-AP students are pretty resilient to any pilot programs that might not be successful or have some bumps along the way.)

Mary Morgan

For example, Google docs and LiveBinders are great, but don’t give the organized notebook “feel.” By notebook “feel” I mean that I like the students to be able to see their notes while they are doing the processing piece on the right side. When they are studying they can have multiple documents “open” in the notebook at the same time (using the flip-ups and right/left side model) which cannot yet be achieved on the iPad. (If we had laptops, I might be more inclined, but I haven’t found anything yet for the iPad. I’m open to suggestions!)

Also, I’ve done some straw-polls with my students (no official, scientific research other than papers I’ve read from others on the topic) and the vast majority of them (usually about 98-99% each year) do not like putting their notes on their iPads. When I go further with the questioning, those who have tried taking notes on the iPad say they never go back and study them because they are hard to find, and they’re distracted by the games and apps that are readily available.

I did allow students to do their notes on their iPads last year if they wanted (they could choose the app -— Goodnotes, Evernote, Notepad, uPad, etc.), but still had to do Cornell style. They come from fully restricted iPads at middle school to unrestricted at high school, so they get really excited about them when they first have them in September. Many started off doing them on the iPad, but by the end of the year had transitioned back to the paper notebook. I think they liked the novelty of the notes on iPad, but they soon realized they were more apt to study the notes and they were easier to access and use for activities/labs/processing when they did them on paper.

Also, I ran into students who weren’t actually copying or writing notes, but instead they were taking photos of presentation slides. This is absolutely not helpful! They never looked back at them and couldn’t find what they needed among the 1000’s of photos. This was a huge issue for both studying and copyright.

My experience is, while copying notes is certainly not the best way to learn (I always have a processing piece to go with the notes so they are forced to wrestle with the information), there is something to the writing part that helps the information start to stick in the brain, at least in the short term memory. However, taking a photo of the notes doesn’t even start the memory firing at all, so this is just rubbish. I allow students to take photos of instructions for lab directions but not their notes. Plus, I post all of our notes on Homeroom, so they have access to the videos/animations/pictures/links/info outside of class.

This year, I did not allow notes on the iPads, unless they first took them in the INB and then copied them to the iPad, which became a good study tool for some. (It was the same as copying paper notes to paper, but with the tech aspect making it more exciting, I guess.)

This is not to say that I do not incorporate the iPad into the INB experience. We use iPads quite often in my classroom. We use online videos (I’ve even created a few of my own!), do web quests, play science learning apps, play study games, take quizzes on Socrative, complete and submit assignments on Homeroom, and create products like videos and infographics on the iPad for various projects. In addition, students look up answers to questions they have and access their textbooks through their iPads. I took a number of classes this summer on App Smashing and Augmented Reality, so I am very excited to begin incorporating these techniques into my classroom this year as well! For my students and I, technology opens up the learning field and creates a wider world in which to study science. For example, instead of simply describing what Darwin found in the Galapagos Islands, we can use Google Earth and actually visit the islands! Or, we can visit virtual museum exhibits to determine how the body systems interact or see the macromolecules in action inside of an organism! In my classroom, the iPads and notebooks are used side-by-side and it seems to work out quite well for the students.

Note:

• Adding to the discussion of notebooks in 1:1 classrooms is a recent article “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking,” summarized here.
• A university professor and a professional scientist share their thoughts in the blog Notebooks as “Dinosaurs”

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fhke/4509556824/sizes/l

A family trip took me to a new and breathtaking location—Glacier National Park. We went before the Reynolds Creek Wildland fire started but evidence of past burns and avalanches was dramatic. The trip also provided the moments I needed away from daily chores to thoroughly read the July issue of Science and Children. Where have you been reading Science and Children this summer? 

Send me a picture of your copy of Science and Children (and you, if you’d like) in your favorite summer location—a beach, your backyard, the neighbor’s pool, a fab museum or on lunch break at your summer job, and I’ll add them to this post. Send your picture of Science and Children to theearlyyearsnsta at gmail dot com.

Send me a picture of your copy of Science and Children (with you, if you’d like to be part of the picture) in your favorite summer location—a beach, your backyard, the neighbor’s pool, a fab museum or on lunch break at your summer job, and I’ll add them to this post.

Here’s a bit about just a few of the many interesting articles in the summer issue:

In “Dig Into Fossils!”, an article free to all, Lisa Borgerding writes about the “big ideas” she introduces to preschool and kindergarten students in a science-focused camp:

• Fossils are the remains of organisms that used to be alive a long time ago.
• We make inferences about fossil organisms’ form, function, and habitats based on observations.
• Fossils can be similar to organisms alive today.

Jyoti Gopal writes about her kindergarten class’s investigation into the taste, color and origin of foods as they tasted their way through the alphabet, in “Eating the Alphabet: Using a daily morning routine to link science, math, literacy, and social studies in a kindergarten classroom” (pgs 50-58). Have you ever tasted a tamarind, tzatziki or turnip?

Editor Linda Froschauer gives tips on how to accomplish an instructional sequence that supports a valid learning progression and can be followed by our learning community in her Editor’s Note: Identifying a Progression of Learning.

If you’d rather read it on your digital device, see the choices here.

Happy reading!

Voting opens today for SXSWedu session proposals for the conference’s 2016 program, and NSTA needs your vote! To be selected for inclusion at SXSWedu, proposals must pass an extremely competitive crowd-sourced PanelPicker process.

The 2016 event marks the sixth anniversary of this highly interactive conference, which converges education’s most energetic and innovative leaders from all backgrounds of the teaching and learning landscape—including teachers, administrators, professors, and business and policy stakeholders—to discuss a number of key topics in education. We want to represent science teachers at the event and, to talk about the role that the next generation of science teachers will play in this fast-changing world.

What can you do to help? Please vote for our session proposal. Why does it work this way? SXSWedu crowd sources sessions to be sure the public has a chance to weigh in on the topics they’d most like to see covered. Public voting, in addition to the comments from the SXSWedu Advisory Board and staff, help to form the 2016 event.

Please help give science educators a voice in the discussion at SXSWedu by casting a vote for NSTA’s session, The Next Generation of Science Teachers. Public voting opens today, August 10, and closes September 4, so check out our session proposal now and cast your vote!

Carolyn Hayes is the NSTA President, 2015-2016; follow her on Twitter at caahayes.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

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What happens when you bring together 150 third- through fifth-grade teachers from around the country for a week of the highest quality professional development around STEM? I found out last week at the 2015 Mickelson ExxonMobil Teachers Academy (MEMTA) in Jersey City, where a major shift in mindset rippled out across all 50 states, expanding like the “Cubes that Grow.” A force was set in motion with the power to transform lives; as teachers, we were asked to teach our students not “what to think” but “how to think.”

The Right Kind of Struggle

At MEMTA, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) prepared five full days of lessons to help teachers build knowledge in specific content areas while experiencing and analyzing the best practices in teaching the multi-dimensional Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Sprinkled throughout the week were inspirational talks by leading thinkers on the subject of how children learn. We began the week with Cathy Seeley, author of Faster Isn’t Smarter and Smarter Than We Think, who spoke about “The Right Kind of Struggle”–creating opportunities for students to work through challenging problems that can increase intelligence. As the week continued, we heard from Sam Shaw and NASA astronaut Leland Melvin; and on Thursday, we spent the afternoon with numerous ExxonMobil engineers.

Each MEMTA class/session is focused around a guiding question. This year the theme was Force and Motion, and as the week progressed we actively explored Newton’s laws while simultaneously considering best practices for engaging students. Strategies were devised for setting up guided explorations and creating a classroom culture in which explanations based on claims and evidence can arise. Practices help students see themselves as scientific thinkers and develop habits of mind and the confidence to pursue a STEM career.

Nurturing Scientific Thinking

As teachers gained confidence and experience throughout the week I heard repeatedly, “it is too bad I have only twenty minutes a day to teach science, art, and social studies.” It is true, the time constraints placed on most public school teachers can seem very restrictive, but there is a way to optimize the impact of teacher-structured classrooms, even on a tight schedule. The scientific approach to problem solving can be applied to other disciplines in the classroom. Teachers can embrace Rodger Bybee’s BSCS 5E Instructional Model and infuse the entire school day with meaningful engagement, rich exploration, and opportunities to learn from each other, with time allowed for purposeful idea sharing. They can encourage students to elaborate and foster an expectation that we will be reflective as we evaluate across the curriculum and throughout the day, so all of our students will grow and develop the thinking skills required to solve today’s problems and future challenges. The scientific mind is not something that turns off at the end of science class.

During the week at MEMTA we worked with the 5E model during both science and math activities. As we return to our schools we can also create language arts, social studies, and art classes that engage students in the same way. So, as we switch from teacher-centered classrooms to teacher-structured classrooms we can move forward with six hours of science-based thinking and claims based reasoning. We can take our experience in Jersey City and pay it forward. We no longer need to feel constrained by a limit of twenty minutes a day to teach science. We can infuse every minute of every school day with opportunities for students to engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate. Developing the habits of mind to think like a scientist can and should move across the curriculum. Teachers can learn to talk less and to listen more.

Learn more about MEMTA and how 3rd- through 5th-grade teachers can apply for next year’s academy at sendmyteacher.com.

Author Eileen Hynes is a 2015 MEMTA participant from the Lake and Park School in Seattle, WA; she can be reached at eileen@lakeandparkschool.org.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

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