Holt Think: Ed, Creativity, Tech, Administration
Does Opting Out Help or Hurt? Opinion There seems to be a growing movement among parents, led by folks such as Diane Ravitch to encourage or to actually remove their students from taking state standardized tests. Parents such as LA Times journalist Karin Klien pulled her daughter out of testing after realizing that they do not actually help the learning process: "As a journalist, reviewing an early state test that had been leaked to the paper by a teacher, I saw how thin and fault-riddled it could be.
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
April 13 Today students took an open – note quiz on the following standards: a. Explain that physical characteristics of organisms have changed over successive generations (e.g. Darwin’s finches and peppered moths of Manchester).
STEM Archives - Cool Cat Teacher Blog
Use the real world to teach without the mess of physical manipulatives. In brief, virtual math manipulatives are powerful tools for math teachers everywhere. On the whole, many teachers don’t understand how to use them.
Talk about science and science teaching
School Science Budget Changes Five years ago, 67% of science educators participating in an informal NSTA Reports poll reported their typical school budget for classroom supplies was less than $500, and 27% expected to spend more than $500 of their own money on classroom supplies. This summer, Reports again asked educators about their school budgets, and found only 12% report budget increases over the last five years, while 41% say budgets have decreased, 40% say they haven’t changed, and 7% say they don’t know.
NOVA Labs Collection
NOVA Labs is a new digital platform where "citizen scientists" can actively participate in the scientific process and take part in real-world investigations by visualizing, analyzing, and playing with the same data that scientists use. Each NOVA Lab is unique, and focuses on a different area of active research. But all of them illustrate key concepts with engaging and informative videos that address why these research topics matter to students and society.
using social media to expand the classroom community
In my last post, I laid out three challenges of parenting a “digital native:” 1. Continuous Partial Attention2. Continuous Public Attention3. Continuous Peer Advice In this post, I want to focus on continuous partial attention, a term coined by Linda Stone in 1998. Note, this is different than multi-tasking-which the effectiveness of the human brain to handle is questionable.
Air Pollution: What's the Solution?
Welcome to Air Pollution: What's the Solution? an educational project for students, grades 6 - 12, that uses online real time data to guide student discovery of the science behind the causes and effects of outdoor air pollution. Through this project, students will focus on outdoor air pollution; what it is, what factors contribute to its formation and the health effects from breathing polluted air. Students will use data and animated maps from the Internet and monitor for the presence of air pollution. Students are challenged to think critically and creatively about the problems surrounding air pollution.
Free Resources
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