Teaching Students Email Etiquette

Does it drive you crazy when you get an email from a student and they put the whole message in the subject line?  Or they write like they are talking to a friend, " hey can u plz send the hw thx"

Wayground (you know them, they used to be Quizziz), created a quiz game you can use with your students to help them understand what to do.  You can also edit the quiz to better meet the needs of your class or school. 

Problem-Attic Test Generator

Problem-Attic is a website that provides teachers with a database of questions from state and national assessments to create tests and worksheets. 

If you are looking for a bank of question from the NYS Regents, SAT, AP Exams or other state assessments, Problem-Attic might be what you are looking for.

The video below will give you a quick overview of what it is all about.

New Turnkey Project-Based Learning Resources for High School STEM Teachers

 

MIT BLOSSOMS, an international education initiative founded in 2008 to encourage high school STEM teachers to pursue more active, student-centered learning, has recently enlarged its focus to support those teachers in moving to Project-Based Learning. Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an emerging teaching/learning strategy. The traditional teaching/learning model has students passively “receiving content” from the teacher, practicing with homework, memorizing for the next exam, and then – tragically – often forgetting it all. PBL offers a substantially different experience where the teacher helps students form small teams and then challenges each team to work on a demanding problem over the course of weeks. The ideal problem is socially important, located in the real world — preferably in the students’ community, and requires mature application of STEM knowledge. The complexity of the problem is such that it has no right or wrong answer, a situation often troubling to students used to formulaic learning. Rather, the team must devise its own procedures for problem framing, formulation, and resolution. In the course of this effort, where now the teacher is mentor or coach, students experience discovery learning — in sharp contrast to taking lecture notes. They also must develop 21st Century skills involving cooperation, collaboration, conflict resolution and reaching out to local professionals who work in the domain of the assigned problem. The team’s problem resolution is typically presented in a final written report and public oral presentation, often with local stakeholders attending. It is a learning exercise that these students will likely never forget!

Yet imagine the challenge for a teacher to design and operate such a PBL project over the course of three to five weeks, while still having to prepare and give lectures for other required topics. This huge teacher preparation “start-up cost” (in terms of time and energy) is certainly one reason why many high school STEM teachers hesitate to try PBL, although they may want to. Our new MIT BLOSSOMS PBL units are designed for just such a teacher – someone who wants to give PBL a try but is not sure just how to get started.

The first five MIT BLOSSOMS PBL units are listed below:

• Green Chemistry
• Special Properties of Water
• Tragedy of the Commons
• Complex Systems
• User-Centered Design

Each of these units is developed to provide a teacher with all the resources and scaffolding needed to lead a three to five-week classroom project. To begin, each unit kicks off from a BLOSSOMS video lesson, thus providing the teacher with anchoring content and clear direction. Teachers have informed us that one of the most useful scaffolds provided in these units is the “Project Calendar,” which offers a detailed, flexible day-by-day schedule for the unit. This calendar includes downloadable resources to lead the project, such as lesson plans, teacher notes, slide presentations, student handouts, homework assignments, etc. — thus removing myriad hours of preparation time for teachers who might not try PBL without such scaffolding. Other valuable resources provided with each of the five BLOSSOMS units include “Video Teacher Guides,” “Summative Assessments,” “Project-Based Learning Tools,” “Teacher Questions/Answers about PBL”, and a discussion of “Common Student Concerns During PBL.”

Education professionals are looking forward to using these new PBL resources. According to Michael Lauro, Associate Executive Director of the Atlantis Charter High School in Fall River, Massachusetts, “We have learned much from collaborating with the MIT BLOSSOMS team over the past three years. We think we have played some role in helping BLOSSOMS define their PBL capabilities, and we look forward to using in our classrooms these five new PBL exercises in the coming academic year.”

Financial support was generously provided to MIT BLOSSOMS by the US OPEN EDUCATION RESOURCES FOUNDATION INC of Ruckersville VA, Lincoln H. Miller, Jr., founder and president.

All content from BLOSSOMS is OER, Open Education Resources, freely available to all.

Student Certification in Digital Citizenship, Study Habits and more

Edpuzzle offers student certifications on a number of topics. If you haven't familiar with Edpuzzle take a look at my previous post about it. Basically it's a way to embed questions into videos and allow you to track students' progress.


You can assign students topics such as: digital citizenship, equal rights, personal finance, emotional intelligence, learning and study habits, health and building character. Each topic has many videos inside it, so you can choose which ones you want to assign to your students. I also like that there are options to add in closed captions and prevent students from skipping ahead.

Turn any video into an assignment

Edpuzzle is a website that you can use to take any video and turn it into an assignment.  This is especially useful if you are using the flipped classroom model.  In a nutshell, Edpuzzle lets you embed questions, audio and notes into the video.  You then assign the video to your class and you get a ton of analytics such as who watched the video and who struggled or did well.  Students can re-watch the video as many times as they need at their own pace, while you can easily check their progress from your account.

Edpuzzle offers free online courses to not only help you understand how to best use Edpuzzle in your classroom, but also includes topics such as the flipped classroom, gamification, project based learning, twenty-first century learning and much more.  What's even better is that they are offered on the Edpuzzle platform so you can experience what your students will. 

Customize your textbook

I have not found a textbook that includes all of the information that I want and leaves out the information that I don't.  I started using CK12 Flexbooks a while ago and love it because I can make the textbook my own.  Plus there are videos that can be added in,  Take a look at the video below on how to customize these online textbooks.

Free Online Textbooks for College level and AP classes

OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University, and its mission is to give every student the tools they need to be successful in the classroom.  In short, it's free online textbooks for the college and AP level.  Many colleges have already started using these resources as a way to help students save money.  Now high schools have starting catching on and have begun using them as well.  You may be familiar with CK12 for high school level textbooks; this is just the next step up. 

OpenStax gives instructor resources such as PowerPoint slides, solution manual, sample syllabus, and assessment banks.  In addition, it also offers connections to various technology resources.  There are a few options to read these books.  You can read them online, download them as a PDF or even send them to your Kindle.  They also offer an option to order print copies from Amazon or buy them in bulk if you want.

Topics include:

Math

• Prealgebra
• Algebra (Elementary, Intermediate and College)
• Trigonometry
• Precalculus
• Calculus
• Statistics

Science

• Anatomy and Physiology
• Astronomy
• Biology
• Concepts of Biology
• Microbiology
• Chemistry
• Physics

Social studies

• American Government
• Economics (principles, macro and micro)
• Psychology
• Sociology
• US History

Buisness

• Intro to Business
• Business Ethics
• Principles of Accounting

AP

• Biology
• College Physics
• Principles of Macroeconomics
• Principles for Microeconomics

Free Math and Science Online Textbooks

“I can’t find my textbook!” “I don’t remember getting a textbook.” Does this sound familiar to you? That is what I kept hearing at the end of every year. Then I would have to go through a big hassle of collecting money from student to repurchase the outdated textbooks that I had. I hated having to worry about students losing textbooks or that I was always replacing textbooks that I didn’t even want that included too much information or not enough information. Enter FlexBooks. FlexBooks are online textbooks from a company called CK12. I instantly liked them for many reasons, but the two big ones were that I could customize the book and that it could be posted on my website and downloaded by the students. This video does a great job of explaining how they work. While not every subject has a FlexBook they have a large list of books that include math and science books for elementary, middle and high school along with some other areas such as Writing, Astronomy, History and Engineering.

So, this sounds good you say, but how can I really use it in my classroom? I picked out a textbook that I wanted to use and then went through it to delete the things that don’t apply to my curriculum. I also added in some information that wasn’t there that I wanted to make sure my students had in their book. You can also include links to worksheets (CK12 has a workbook that goes along with most of their textbooks). Once it’s created you can save it as a PDF and post it on a web page or e-mail it to students. Even better, students can put the PDF on their computers, phones, Kindles, IPads, Nooks or other eReader. If you don’t want to customize your book you can find select FlexBooks already in Kindle or Nook/IPad/Android format.

Am I convincing you yet? Maybe you want to make sure you have a teacher’s edition to refer to or a book or worksheets or labs. Well, you got it! The workbooks that are available can also be customized so can you make them fit your classroom. I usually post them on my website and the students can have access to them all the time (no more “I lost it.”)

Looking for more? CK12 has a more interactive way of presenting information that allows you pull short concepts along with chapters into an online interactive “book” Many of the concepts include video clips and interactive quizzes.

Do you use textbooks in your classroom? 

crossposted on by Science Blog - SavvySecondaryScience

The easiest, free test and worksheet generator

I haven't mentioned Problem-Attic in several years, but I thought that I'd bring it up again.  Since I mentioned it last the number of questions available has more than doubled.  It is so easy to search through the question bank and create tests and quizzes.  For me, it's the only test generator I use.  With all of the questions available, why would I pay for something else?

Take a look at the video below to see what Problem-Attic is like and how easy it is to use.

If you want to see my previous posts you can find them here and here.

What do you use to create tests and quizzes?

Making a Screen Recording using PowerPoint

Screen recordings can be so helpful.  I find myself making them at least once a month to show a colleague how something is done.  It is also helpful to record directions for students especially when teaching a new skill.  It's much easier to have students refer back to a video of me instead of repeating myself over and over during the same period.  The easiest way to open the screen recording tool is to locate the box that says "Tell me what you want to do" and type in screen recording.

Once you click on Insert Screen Recording, PowerPoint will minimize that the following box will appear. 

You will want to click on select area and highlight the area you want to record.  You can choose to record part or all of the screen.  You can then select or deselect Audio depending on if you want audio also recorded.  If the box is gray, then it is selected.  You can do the same for Record Pointer.  Once you are ready click on the red Record button.  You will get a 3-2-1 countdown and then your recording will start.  The box will disappear and your screen will be recorded.  When you are done with your recording you can either move your mouse up to the top of the screen and the box will appear again for you to stop the recording.  You can also press the windows button, shift and Q at the same time to stop the recording.  

The recording will now appear on a side of your PowerPoint presentation.  You can right click on it to save the video, but you also have the option to do some editing. 

The editing that you can do is pretty basic, but the most useful feature is the ability to trim the video.  To access this, click on Playback in the Video Tools ribbon and then you will see Trim Video.  You can only trim to beginning or ending, but it's helpful to get rid of the extra stuff that you accidentally record.

I hope this helps you in your screen recording endeavors.  Leave a comment if there is something else that you would like to learn about.

Pin this image so you can find this post later on. 

Fun Socrative Quizzes

Socrative is a great program that allows you to collect feedback from student.  If you don't know about it yet, go on over to this post.

Socrative has created several quizzes that you can import into your account.  They are great to use if you want something fun to use to teach kids how to use the app or if you are demonstrating it to other teachers.  Some of the topics of the premade quizzes include 80s Trivia, State Facts, Subject Verb Agreement and 2004 Red Sox.

To see the complete list and find out how to import them into your account visit this page.

Socrative - collect real time data on formative assessments

Socrative is something that I have used in the past and plan to use again in the future.  I really like it because it allows me to have students answer questions about a topic.  Then I can use the data from their answers to the questions to see where they are confused and what things I need to review more with them.

One of the things that I love about socrative is that it works on any device or browser so kids can answer questions on ipads, computers, phone or whatever they have.

Socrative just updated to their 2.0 version. Below is a video that explains it and this link will take you to the new user guide.

How to collect feedback and data from your students.

Science Comics

This is not super techy, but I came across website of science comics that I wanted to share.  Sciencetoons are cute one panel comics about a range of topics.  They cover a range of topics, but I think the chemistry ones are just great.  Check them out and enjoy!

Sharing Resources with Google Docs

A number of years ago I created some shared folders in Google Drive for the different science and levels.  I want to share them with you now.  I would love to have you share some items in one or more of these folders as well.  If you are interested, please send me an e-mail and I will add you as a contributor.

Middle School Biology

Middle School Chemistry

Middle School Earth Science

Middle School Physics

High School Biology

High School Chemistry

High School Earth Science

High School Physics

Do you have a favorite go to site for resources?