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.

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 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

Augmented Reality in the Science Classroom

This weekend I made a presentation about Augmented Reality in the science classroom.  Everyone seemed to really be excited about using these apps in their classroom.  I've posted my presentation below that you can benefit from it as well!  Most of these apps are available for both Android and Apple.

For those of you who aren't familiar with augmented reality, it's a way to superimpose a computer generated image onto a real world experience.  I know this doesn't explain it very well, so I suggest you download one of the apps and try it out.  Here is a quick video demonstrating one of my favorite apps Anatomy 4D.





This post also appears on my other blog Savvy Secondary Science. 

Bird Brain Science - science meets the common core

BirdBrain Science is a website that allows you to provide your students with common core based science readings that you can differentiated based on their reading level.  Most articles will adjust anywhere from 3rd to 8th grade.  In addition, the students can have the articles read to them.  At the end there is a short quiz.  The quiz questions, types and length, vary depending on what grade level they were assigned.  At the end you can review reports of your students' program.

Below is a short video to explain the site a little more.

Follow this link to participate in a pilot to access this site for free.

What ways do you incorporate reading into your classroom?

This post is cross posted on my other blog Savvy Secondary Science 

NMLSTA Boston 2014 Share-A-Thon Presenter Handouts

As promised I am sharing some awesome resources I came across at the NSTA conference.  I went to a National Middle Level Science Teachers Association share-a-thon and there were some great things that people were doing.

NMLSTA and the presenters were nice enough to share their resources in the a shared Dropbox folder.

While you don't need a dropbox account to view the files, if you want to make a copy to save in your own dropbox you can get an account here. 

What is one of your favorite places to find new resources for your classroom?

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?

PhET Science Simulations

If you haven't used the PhET simulations with your class, you are missing out!  These are great simulations for all areas of science.  I love them because there are some times when setting up an actual lab is not possible and these simulations provide students with the experiences to understand the concept.
PhET was Java based, but are not moving into creating simulations that run on HTML.  What does that mean?  They will not run on machines that don't have Java such as iPads and Chromebooks.  Even better, there is a page where other teachers have submitted their lesson plans and worksheets that go along with these sims; so everything is practically done for you!
They are even in the process of developing a Teach with Sims page to help you out more.  You can check out the prototype that they have already developed.

What other computer sites do you use in your classroom? 

ChemThink

ChemThink is a website that I can across this year and am eager to try with my students this year.  Students can sign up for it individually, but if they register as part of your class you can track their progress.
It's a very simply designed website, but the basic principle is good.  You can assign students various sections of the site based on what you are currently teaching.  They can go through a tutorial if they need a refresher or some more information about the topic or they can go right to the question set.  They have to get 10 questions right before they can more on.  If they miss too many in a row, they will have to restart the problem set.  The questions also increase in difficult as they move through the set.
There is also a feature that allows you to correlate to your textbook.  This make the question sets match up to the chapters in your textbook.

I am looking forward to using it next year as my school doesn't purchase subscriptions to sites like Castle Learning and this looks like is a nice substitute (you know me....anything that is free is great!).

Do you use any online questioning sites with your classes?  What are your favorites?

Regents Chemistry - worksheets, labs and notes

For those of you who teach Chemistry I have a website that has great worksheets on it.  It's called Evan's Regents Chemistry Corner.  While it is geared towards those who teach in NY, Chemistry isn't all that different around the country.  It also some worksheets and activities for those who teacher honors classes and might be preparing their students for the SAT II.
As a new science teacher, this website has helped me out so much when I needed a homework assignment or worksheet to do in class.  Some of the worksheets are better than other...I like the worksheets the best.  The lessons is a good thing to give students who are absent or those who need read a topic in a different way.  It's also a good reading assignment for the students (hello Common Core!), especially when you are going to be absent and you want to leave something substantial.

Check it out and let me know what you think!