When curiosity is sparked...

My top three strategies, ideas, or tools of the week!
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• Looking for a tangible application for leveraging VR in the classroom?  Recently our school acquired a classroom set of Google Cardboard VR goggles via a generous donation from an former student. I have been struggling to find classroom applications until I came across Google Expeditions, an immersive platform that lets you go on VR trips to historical landmarks, go down to the atomic level, get up close with sharks, and even visit outer space! My head is spinning with applications for exploring the atom in chemistry, cells in biology, and so much more yet to discover. Check it out! 

 

• Interested in a SWEET chrome experiment designed to help students interact and invent with music?  Check out Chrome Music Lab. This  chrome experiment even features its own Song Maker, allowing to create and share your own music. My mind is spinning with all the invention possibilities, especially when interfacing this chrome experiment with the MakeyMakey when facilitating summer science camp. 

 

• [warning...repeat bullet!] Curious about training students to facilitate Professional Development for other students AND EVEN teachers? Student-Driven EdCamps might be an easy way in the door. To be honest, I am not sure when, or if, I would begin to implement something like this at my school site, but it does represent a solid protocol for empowering student-student and student-teacher collaboration via an informal model that has proven successful at empowering teachers. I keep coming back to this article and musing over its potential and possible variants. 

Before every major assessment I like to facilitate review activities in class. That being said, I can only handle the Kahoot theme song so much, play so many games of "Chemistry Jeopardy", or figure out another variation of Periodic Table Battleship to satisfy review of the whatever skills we are learning that topic. 

Not that there is anything wrong with the above games, or the myriad of variations. Indeed, if I played Kahoot everyday my students would be STOKED! 

However, the above review games, in my mind, always fall short in one area: student creation/invention.

This is where Google Forms is a powerful tool! During the past unit on Formula Analysis, distributed a different problem to each team of students. 

I then asked each of students to input their solution AND a Youtube video of them solving their problem on a whiteboard into  a Google Form.

I then made the output spreadsheet public, and students spent time solving one another's problems, and watching one another's solutions when they were stuck.

Although not as superficially engaging as Kahoot, watching students invent videos to explain their problems, and negotiate not only the problem, but also how to teach it, was incredibly inspiring, and IMO, much more engaging from an outside perspective. 

Although this post is represents an extremely simple application of Google Forms, one I'm sure many of you have already done before or experimented with in the past, the power of immediately sharing the output formula with students, containing live links to the videos THEY created, was worth sharing. 

Click here for the Google Form and here for the output spreadsheet. See screenshots below as well. 

My top three strategies, ideas, or tools of the week!
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• Do you send a similar type of email to students, parents or colleagues constantly? Click here to learn more about creating "Canned Response" email templates. Canned Responses is a Gmail feature allowing users to create and save multiple email templates in their inbox. 

 

• Curious about Curiosity? Click here for an excellent recent review of the research literature on Curiosity in The Atlantic featuring the work of Wiliams College Professor Susan Engel, best known for her lecture: The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity  

 

• Interesting in bringing STEM to your life science class? In my 9th grade Biology class last year we leveraged the Lego Mindstorm system to conduct an Evolution simulation. Students play three rounds of Robot  Sumo which model three generations of reproduction. During each round resources are removed and students are challenged to reconstruct their robots to leverage the structures of the winners from the previous generation. "Limited Resources" of legos, code "gene mutations" were a few of the techniques used to model the process.