Classroom III

This time of the school year is marked by the traditional behaviors and aliments.  March Madness?  Must be.  It is time for teen aged students to start talking louder, jumping around, and fighting at the drop of a hat.  Girls and boys.  All the high school students want to talk about who is taking whom to the Prom.  They are planning their week or weekend at the beach.  Prom night  is Thursday night prior to Good Friday.  All my students have a running nose from the pollen.  Thank goodness for tissues.  

This being said, it is time for a focused and well planned curriculum.  Tomorrow, my students will work in groups to research sea turtles.  I was disappointed when I could not find any videos devoted to sea turtle.  Not that I plan to just turn on the video and let them watch, even though it is tempting, I wanted to show students how sea turtles move their paddle shaped flippers to help them swim.  I want to help my students observe and contrast the mode of locomotion in turtles.  We subscribe to Unitedstreaming and they only had a couple of title with turtles.  Usually, they have about anything I look for. 

I will have to go through that pile of video catalogs I have been hording all winter.  Maybe there is a video out their for us to use next year.  Maybe I should have planned this Friday Seminar a couple of months ago so I could  have ordered a video.  I just hate overly organized people. 

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http://www.popsci.com/popsci/periodictable/

This periodic table is really interesting in that the elements are hyperlinked to QTVR movies of samples.  My favorite is the gold element.  I downloaded the QTVR movie of a gold coin and showed it to my students on our digital projector.  This might be fun to use with an interactive whiteboard.  If the software would allow students to touch the element on the whiteboard and the whiteboard would react like a touch screen. 

Have you ever tried this in your classroom?

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David Warlick posts an invite to participate from home and this is a great idea.  I will not be able to attend the event and hope to follow the conversations distantly.  Thanks Dave!

2 Cents Worth » EduBloggerCon Stuff — from home

I’ve set up a starter page on the EduBloggerCon wiki site, asking folks (you) to pose starter questions that might be a good springboard for these sorts of group conversations. I’ve included three obvious ones, but encourage you to enhance these questions and add others. I’d like to keep the list as short as possible, so if you can add your question by piggybacking on an existing one, that would be great.

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This week marks the last week of the grading period. One of the Friday Seminar activities our middle school students have participated in has been a study of North Carolina animals. Students pulled names out of a hat to select an animal. The next step was for students to research their animal. Students used a list of questions to gather information about an animal found in our state. This information was then used for their posters. Students then drew their own pictures of their animal. This student did an outstanding job with his Students enjoyed having their eyes layered into a photo of an animal.

The photo of a beaver is located in the lower right hand corner of the poster below. Since I do not have copyrights to use the image on the web, I did not try to enlarge it. The final step was to have students report to the class on what they learned. We ran out of time, and had to skip this last step. In order to motivate students to use critical thinking skills, we discuss a variety of concepts intertwined with the study of animals. We use the posters to hook students into concepts like life cycles, adaptations, interdependence, habitats, food chains, and food webs. Of these topics, only life cycles and adaptations are specific to one animal. Broader topics related to an entire ecosystem cannot be addressed in a report focused upon one animal. So the animal poster is the bases for animal reports assigned to help students understand the life cycles of various animals. Also, the reports will help show how an animal’s successful adaptation to an environment is necessary for survival.

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