Using classroom 2.0 for middle school science

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Permalink Reply by Blair Williams on January 20, 2009 at 8:14am

Well Derek I think we can start using some RSS feeds to get more current events in our class. I set it up in ANGEL and it was easy. I'm not sure how to do it through igoogle yet.

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Permalink Reply by Derek Grimm on January 20, 2009 at 8:24am

Blair, I have used JING in my classroom to capture content such as chemical equations, and then posted them in Angel for students to view on their own time.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Bloede on January 20, 2009 at 8:34am

Blair,do we have to worry about content. I would like to have access to a constant feed of info about science current articles. Did you know that bird flu is back and killing people? Blair, find the sites and let me know how to do this today.

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Permalink Reply by Blair Williams on January 20, 2009 at 8:39am

Mark, I don't know how to do RSS in google but it is easy in ANGEL. Sign on and edit your page. Add the RSS and then you can pick what areas you want it to feed you. Let me know if you have questions.

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Permalink Reply by Lonnie Miller on January 21, 2009 at 7:33am

RSS feeds in Google are easy to set up with Google Reader. It is found under the more tab. Just paste in the links from your websites and they are all there in one easy to see screen.

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Permalink Reply by Rebecca on January 21, 2009 at 2:12pm

NSTA has a number of RSS feeds that you can subscribe to for professional content. I have them on my blog, too.

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Permalink Reply by John Sowash on January 21, 2009 at 2:45pm

I monitor several teacher blogs and when I find something that I think might be useful in the future, I save the link in the biology wiki that I created. The trick is to remember that you saved it so that when you get the the unit or topic to which the resource is relevant, you can use it!

I also have a physical "idea" folder in my file cabinet in which I put news articles that I find in the paper or magazines or interesting things that people give me.

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Permalink Reply by Jay Fogleman on January 22, 2009 at 5:43am

I have encountered this challenge as well when bookmarking online science content that I think might be useful for my preservice science teachers. My solution was to create a tag for each unit in Diigo/Delicious, e.g. Resources_Genetics, Resources_Evolution, etc, and use these tags to tag articles that I see while browsing. I put each tag's RSS feed on a different wikispace page in our class wiki. My students can use the linked articles or reuse these feeds in their own class wikis.

Eventually, I plan to assign a student to be a "topic editor" in the fall for each of these tags so I'm not the only one tagging articles for the group, but I do not yet know how to have a group share the same set of tags in Diigo or Delicious.

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Permalink Reply by Carol Ross-Baumann on January 21, 2009 at 3:14pm

I love VoiceThread. It is great to use for very short formative assessments and could be used in a myriad of ways in science. (voicethread.com) Kids (and teachers) can enter comments and ideas in many ways- writing, recording, drawing while recording, and using the webcam to record your response to a question or to a problem. If you check out their website, you will find lots of ideas. Good luck.

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Permalink Reply by Eve Heaton on January 22, 2009 at 3:06am

I taught sixth grade science last year and hardly used web 2.0 technologies at all. I was a first year teacher and surviving the middle school was most pressing but in hindsight I wish I had utilized technology more. The only things I had my students do was a pretty passive webquest (hurricanes) and I had created links to quite a few online activities and games that fit our standards (plants, animals, weather, energy) and let the kids have a "game" day once a month in the computer lab. I also did utlize one of the Glenco labs that came with our textbook set on identifying the parts of plants and flowers.

This year my students are working in groups creating and publishing animal reports using google docs. They haven't done this yet but I am playing around with toondoo.com to have students make a cartoon based on some process they are learning in science. They will be filiming our upcoming composting project and taking pictures/blogging their weekly observations of our bins.

I have personally started uploading student examples of the interactive science notebooks I use in the class to a blog I maintain on the subject (www.sciencenotebooking.blogspot.com). That isn't a student driven activity but I don't see why it couldn't be (would be great for students who need to make up work). I know another teacher who has a podcast student of the day who records the homework and posts it to her website, which I though was pretty cool.

If I think of any thing more I will definitely add.

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Permalink Reply by Rick Biche on January 24, 2009 at 8:59pm

Hi Derek. For the past two years I have had students using RSS for science news. I build this into my weekly schedule. I also put our weekly agenda out through a blog so they can subscribe to that feed as well. I have dabbled with Voicethread, Bubbl.us (online mind-mapping- there are others), and organized collaborative projects such as The Jason Project and Yes-I-Can Science. This year, with the collaboration of other local middle school science teachers I launched our science fair wiki. This has been a great success, with over 395 students actively involved. While it is nice to have the projects posted online, it is the interaction between students from different grades, classes, and buildings that has really been the best to watch. This has also been a great opportunity for students to tie together different tech tools. They use RSS to monitor other students pages and discussions. This facilitates easier interaction and the building of learning networks.

Keep us posted on what else you come up with.

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Permalink Reply by Tim Barlow on January 25, 2009 at 2:55am

I just blog (http://mrbarlow.wordpress.com/) anything interesting I come across and (some of) my students learn about the content because they are intrinsically motivated to do so due to interest.

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