SMART Board tips from TIES

Here are a few SMART board tips I learned at the TIES confrence.  Click the link below to watch the youtube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn_Q1kfMsR0

Answering the questions: What can I do with Interactive Video Conferencing and why is it important? By Carole Velasquez

I attended Traveling Minnesota Virtually to Meet STEM and Arts Standards and was excited to learn how to use video conferencing and how local and global organizations are supporting STEM in the classroom.  

Tami Moehring, MN Historical Society representative, explained how a videoconference project gives you and your student an opportunity to learn and interact with another school or classroom around the world without leaving your classroom.  I found this extremely timely, since I have a student moving to Africa and the parents want to stay linked to our STEM curriculum. 

Exploring for our upcoming first grade rock and soil unit, the Grand Canyon lesson opportunities via video conferencing support our standards.  “Do you live hundreds or thousands of miles from Grand Canyon National Park, but wish you could bring your class to the canyon? Why not invite a virtual ranger to your classroom? For schools with video-conferencing equipment, we offer geology and ecology-based educational programs via two-way conferencing over the Internet.” (Source: http://www.nps.gov/grca/forteachers/upload/TestProgramMailout2011-2012.pdf)

Listed below are some helpful ideas and websites, which provide students with communication and global literacy skills and teachers with collaboration opportunities:

• Videoconference Project Book
  https://files.pbworks.com/download/cw1u5nQxP8/collaborativevcs/30633329/ProjectsBooklet.pdf?ld=1
• Grand Canyon – http://www.nps.gov/learn/distance.htm (exploring for the First Grade Rock Unit) 
• International Wolf Center – http://www.wolf.org/wolves/experience/podcasts.asp (offering free sessions and materials via video conferencing) 
• Center for Puppetry Arts – http://www.puppet.org/edu/distance.shtml (Literacy and Science connection) 
• Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration - http://www.cilc.org/ 
• Minnesota Interactive Learning Collaboration - https://sites.google.com/a/mnhs.org/milc/

"Flipped" Professional Development by Tony Eatchel

During my time at TIES I was focusing on Technology Coaching and Professional Development.  What really caught my eye was the “flipped” model of Technology Professional Development.  Flipped Professional Development can transform teachers through personalized online instruction and face-to-face workshop time with technology integration specialists.

The key to a Flipped program is having online Tutorials, Videos, and How To’s that teachers can easily access and watch when ever they have the time.  Then teachers can come to the Technology Specialist with specific questions and issues.

Currently we have a good number of video tutorials, district created tutorials and links that have already been created.  In the coming months we will build a page of the links so our staff can access them and work through some basic Technology content knowledge.  Our goal as a staff is to use our Technical, Pedagogical and Content knowledge together to create lessons that are meaningful and engaging for our students!

Technology, Pedagogy, Content Knowledge (Venn)

Creating Innovators at TIES 2012

After seeing the Keynote speaker Dr. Tony Wagner, I began to think of how the STEM classroom can become a catalyst for creating young innovators. 

Dr. Wagner maintains if the following three elements are developed by parents, teachers and mentors an enormous difference can be make in the lives of young innovators.

• Play
• Passion 
• Purpose

 Play:
An child's imagination which explores different worlds, learning new ideas and reflecting on possibilities is a form of play.  The research about the importance of play spans many decades.  Maria Montessori, Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget have all done groundbreaking research on the importance of play.  Play is a part of human nature and an intrinsic motivator.

Passion:
Passion is the intrinsic motivation to explore something new, understand something more deeply and master something difficult.  In his book The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the importance of working at something for ten thousand hours in order to achieve mastery.  Gladwell identifies famous innovators such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.   Their time spent on their products was passion driven.

Purpose:
As much as passion drives young innovators, purpose is far more deeper and more sustainable.  This sense of purpose can take many forms, Dr. Wagner found the greatest purpose, the desire to somehow make a difference in the world.

I hope you enjoy this TED talk from Tony Wagner:

How are you providing PASSION, PLAY and PURPOSE in your classroom?

2012 Ties Conference

The TIES 2012 conference made me wish I could be in two places at once and then made me believe there would soon be an app for that. 

The Stillwater Area Schools, which use a tech coaching model as we do, showcased several elementary student projects.  Some of my favorites included one in which selected first graders used i Books Author to write a children’s book, illustrate it with scanned-in student art or with photographs, and then record it read aloud by using a Widget to move an audio file into the book.  Special Education teachers used a similar format to write short, story-based lessons on social skills, such as Quiet Hands, Sometimes I Get Sad, and Sometimes I Get Mad. Some were illustrated with drawings and some with photos of the targeted student himself using the correct behavior.  Another involved collaboration between elementary student authors and high school students enrolled in American Sign Language classes. Young authors wrote text and recorded their stories and illustrations. The finished products were downloaded to i Pads, so anyone in the district could view the elementary students’ images and hear them reading the story aloud as a high school student simultaneously signed the text in ASL.

A fifth grade group interviewed residents at a Retirement Center in order to write their biographies.  Three students would team up with each participating resident.  The students gathered information about each stage of the senior’s life.  They used iMovie and cooperatively compiled and edited the scripts, which were filed in Google Docs, then recorded and edited the sound using Audacity and Captasia.  The students shared responsibility for getting permissions, planning the steps and managing the various source files using Google Docs.  Each of twenty residents, or (unfortunately) their surviving families, received an iBook biography containing five or six chapters.

Other projects included digital student portfolios, student recorded videos on topics such as Digital Citizenship and Preventing Cyber Bullying, and fifth graders writing graphic novels on the Civil War. Another potentially effective project was fourth grade blogs in which students rotated responsibilities for recapping the week’s learning in each of the subject areas.  This might prove to be a good way to review and allow for needed repetition on the previous week’s lessons, as well as writing practice for the bloggers.

I attended a session on Visualization, which emphasized the importance of using visual images during our teaching to be sure students get a good enough picture in their minds to help them grasp content.  The most important take-away for me was an introduction to two new NASA websites.  One is Eyes on Earth NASA, which would be helpful for teaching earth science topics, and the other is Eyes on the Solar System NASA. We have used other solar system sites from NASA in our third grade unit, but this new one will enrich our study of the solar system by allowing us to look at features such as comets, asteroids, planets and galaxies separately and view celestial bodies from many different perspectives, very interactively.

Janet Henk

Communicating with the World

Communicating with the World!

We are heading into a very exciting time of year where students begin to post Podcasts and Voicethreads up to the internet.  Did you know last year we published over 400 Podcasts and Voicethreads?  Nearly every grade level posts research information, short stories, and songs about Science, Social Studies, and many other curricular areas.  It is a great place for your students to see the learning that is happening here at Cedar Park.

Check out our Fourth Grade students recently posted their Voicethreads on Water.  They talk about the water cycle, ways to conserve water, and how much water they personally used in a week.  The great thing about Voicethread is the ability to make comments on their work.  So other students can login and comment on their peers great ideas!  Just have your students click on the Green Microphone on our homepage to take a look...

Our First Grade students are finishing up their Insect Flip Book Podcasts.  They studied insect in the first trimester and then wrote a short story about a insect.  We are recording their stories and you will be able to see them on the podcast page in December.  Have your students click on the Purple i Icon on our homepage to check out all of our upcoming Podcasts!

Inquiry and the Happy Scientist

Having a sense of inquiry is a foundational skill for 21st century students.  Being able to wonder about something and investigate the answer fosters creativity.  We know that having a daily inquiry question promotes critical thinking and questioning skills for learners. 

Robert Krampf is the Happy Scientist who produces a well written daily blog.  One of the components of his blog is a daily science picture with a question.  Robert does his own photography and captures images of science in his backyard.  The topics vary and include all of the sciences.  With each photograph there is an inquiry question.  He asks his readers WHY?  Questions to promote deep thinking, investigation and create curious minds.  Robert posts the answers the next day on his website to learn from.  You can access the science photo of the day by clicking on this link:  Happy Scientist

How might you use a science photo and daily question such as this in your classroom?

Written by Michelle Ament

Teaching Habits of Mind: Part 1

-->

Teaching Habits of Mind: It’s not whether you HAVE it or not, it’s how you USE and IMPROVE it.

 

            “Smart is not something you are, it’s something you get.” I remember the first time I saw this saying on a poster in a classroom. I thought to myself, “that’s a good one, I need to use that in my own room.” As teachers, we like to post inspiring quotes throughout our rooms in the hopes that students will read them and take them to heart. I hate to admit it, but even though I loved this quote, I never really thought of it as more than just that: something to inspire. I never consciously considered taking the attitude that this quote hopes to inspire and incorporate it into my teaching. This can be far more than a quote. It should be how we teach the Habits of Mind to our students.

            Teaching the habits as fixed characteristics that somebody already possesses does a disservice to students because they begin to see the habits as unchanging, and potentially unattainable. If a student has trouble thinking independently and we imply that smart people inherently think that way, the student may feel like they can never succeed because they don’t “have” it now. But if we teach the habit as something that smart people work on and develop, we teach that even if you're not good at the habit now, you can get better. This idea of striving to improve our habits of mind is crucial to all students feeling they can succeed.

            Being able to use the habits of mind is not enough. We should strive to improve upon our habits. If we find that we are performing poorly at one habit, we should ask ourselves how we could do better. As educators, we can do this for our students. The habits can be thought of as a muscle; we all have them to begin with but they may be weak. As we work on toning them, they become stronger. If we let them go unused, they may degrade back to weakness. When we see our students using their habits, we should ask ourselves how well they are using them. If students are struggling with a habit, encourage them to find ways to improve upon it. Help them understand that everyone is capable of the habits, but we all need to work on how well we use them.

Source: Mindful By Design

Written by Matt Armstrong

Inspiring Curiosity in the World Around Us

-->

 E4 Conference: Inspiring Curiosity in the World Around Us"

Stuff to Blow Your Mind Blog

The keynote address at the E4 Conference was titled “Inspiring Curiosity in the World Around Us” given by Julie Douglas and Robert Lamb; they both write for the blog “Stuff to Blow Your Mind” at Howstuffworks.com.  The main takeaway from this address was that we are all scientists, mathematicians and engineers. The world is an amazing place with a multitude of stimuli and we should strive to take in as much of it as we can. As teachers, we should encourage this in our students.

We are all scientists. Children, even as babies, are much more conscious of the world around them than adults. This is because adults have experiences and preconceived notions that shape how we see the world. Children do not yet have such schema to guide their understanding of stimuli. Adults are much more attached to their prior beliefs than children. Children see their world in a very raw, statistical way, called Bayesian Thinking.

Children are innate physicists, accountants and storytellers. They have an innate number sense that is tied back to the physical body; notice that most man-made number systems are based on fives, tens and twenties. Coincidence? Even though babies do not understand number systems, they do understand quantities (more or less), making them born accountants. Science tells a story and children are very good at telling stories, making them natural scientists.

They also focused on the importance of play. There are five main components to play: play celebrates uncertainty; it is acceptable to change; it is open to possibility; it is cooperative; it is intrinsically motivated. All of these different components can be applied to scientific observation. Thus it is important when teaching science to bring play in when possible.

They also focused on critical thinking. Children are very imaginative but they also equally capable of critical thinking. Given several possibilities to solve a problem or question, the simplest one is the most likely solution, and children understand this. Called “Occam’s Razor,” this allows us to look at an event and possible solutions. We examine all the steps it would take to logically reach each solution. The solution with the fewest number of steps is the most likely. This can be a game to play with children to use critical thinking skills.

I found this talk of everyone being scientists and being influenced in the way we see the world based on prior beliefs to be fascinating. It can be hard as adults to step back, away from our own schemas, and see the world as children see it; unfiltered. They are so in tune to details that we might so easily overlook. If we can bring this fact into our own consciousness, we can maybe better understand what our students are seeing and trying to process. I encourage you to check out the “Stuff to Blow Your Mind” blog. It has many great articles about viewing the world as children do and could be valuable resource to our teaching.

Written by Matt Armstrong

It's Not Magic, It's Science!

 Jerry Wenzel is the wacky professor of this fun, fast paced workshop.  He presents many "magic tricks" that use the basic foundations of science and engineering.  The class stretches your thinking as you try to solve, "How did he do that?"

Matt Armstrong would make a wonderful wacky professor!  I hope that he decides to use some of these magic tricks with the students during Exploration Classes!

Note:  Some of these activities use candles and lit paper.  Hopefully he won't do these under one of the sprinkler heads!

Frogs, Volts, and Vinegar: Engineering Electricity from Past to Present

-->

By Sheryl Struble 

 One of the sessions I attended at the E4 Conference was Frogs, Volts, and Vinegar: Engineering Electricity from Past to Present.  The presenters were from the Bakken Museum.  During this session we learned how a battery works.  We experimented by soaking a paper towel in a vinegar and water solution.  We then used small squares of sheet metal and small squares of copper to create a “sandwich.”  We continued to build using the layering of copper, paper towel, and sheet metal until we had enough placed together to light a light bulb and make a buzzer sound.  Each time we built the sandwich we placed one end of the light bulb wire to the topside and then one to the bottom side.  This experiment replicated the inside of a battery and how a battery works. 

 The second experiment was to build a “magic wand.” We were given a light bulb, 2 wires, 2 batteries, and two paper fasteners.  We needed to build a circuit.  Once the circuit was built and we lit the light bulb we knew we were successful.  The circuit was taped onto a sheet of white paper and then rolled up and taped to look like a wand.  Touching a ring that was on your finger to the copper fasteners is what made the “magic wand” light.  

Both of these Engineering designs will be helpful during our Energy and Electromagnetism Unit in 4^th grade.  More information about the Bakken Museum can be found by clicking on the link below.

www.thebakken.org

Science Outside the Box

By Cindy Altendahl & Lauren Knutson

We attended the session titled "Kids Gotta Build" facilitated by Dr. Jane Snell Copes. It focused on the importance of kids physically building things in school. Some of the essential questions addressed in the session were: What do we learn from building? Why is it so urgent that kids physically build things at school? and How can we modify classrooms to allow this important work? Below are some of the examples that could be made out of simple materials in our classrooms. We thought that some of these were great science extensions or wonderful ideas for exploration or after school projects. 

Dr. Cope is available for school visits and also has resources at her website: www.scienceoutsidethebox.com 

Cranky Box

Toppers

Marble Maze