High School Science and Web 2.0

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Permalink Reply by Steve Dickie on February 17, 2010 at 4:08am

I also teach high school physics. I was inspired by Darren Kuropatwa, a Canadian Math Teacher, to try Class Scribes. My first attempt was in Blogger, but then I moved to using Ning.

In Ning I had students posting daily notes (when I remembered to assign someone to), asking questions about labs/home work/tests. Students also shared pictures of projects under construction. It was pretty cool, but I didn't push too hard so by the end of the school years I used it it kind of pettered out. I was trying to walk the fine line of "this is cool" and "this is work".

This year I'm using an online system called LON-CAPA (which is also used by many colleges) to share stuff with students and do online home work. It allows for students to comment on each question of a problem set and so they can help each other.

I've also played a bit with Google tools. I have a Google Site I use to share "stuff" with my students. The same site is used by students to collaborate on projects. My site is physics.divinechildhighschool.org if you want to give it a look. Check out the Physics of Sports section. It's still pretty rough and will continue to be. But the projects are evolving pages and by the end of the year should be great.

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Permalink Reply by Darren Kuropatwa on February 18, 2010 at 9:40am

Hey Steve, fascinated by your use of ning for building a community of scribes in your class. Would love to hear how it goes if you try it again. I know a number of other teachers have also started using scribes in their classes.

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Permalink Reply by John Sowash on February 17, 2010 at 5:43am

Hi Cecilia, I teach high school biology and anatomy & physiology. The tools that I use aren't necessarily unique to science, they're good tools for any discipline. One of my favorites is YouTube. You can find a short video clip illustrating almost any principle on YouTube. Teachers have YouTube access at my school, but students don't, so I have to show them clips. They make good class openers.

My school also uses a wiki to post student work and organize online discussions. You can view ours here. I recently discovered that wikispaces has a Delicious (a bookmarking website) gadget that allows me to save and share helpful websites with my students.

Google Docs is another favorite of mine. I can upload PowerPoint presentations, share them on the wiki, and give class surveys and even quizzes.

I would recommend that you join Twitter (if you haven't already) and start following other science teachers. You will gather lots of helpful tips and information over time! My Twitter ID is @jrsowash.

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Permalink Reply by Cecilia Tung on February 17, 2010 at 1:31pm

Thanks, John. It's good to see an example of someone's class Wiki. That's probably what I will try next. Is there a reason you chose Wikispaces over another platform like PBWorks? You'll see me on Twitter soon!

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Rita Oates on February 17, 2010 at 6:10am

ePals offers several collaborative learning projects in science topics. These include: Water, Habitat, Natural Disasters, Climate Change, and Weather. Each project has brief lesson plans, correlation to national standards, and a plan for collaboration with another classroom by email. All these projects are free. "Related resources" provide a list of websites, books and other ideas to extend and enrich the study, from sources such as zoos, museums, nonprofit groups, and government sites. Typically, a teacher finds a partner classroom through ePals and then follows the plan for gathering and exchanging information in five emails between students or classes. Related online forums allow for discussion of the topic by teachers or students, with moderation by ePals staff.

In addition, other online forums for students and for teachers make it easy to connect with others or just ask some questions pertinent to a topic of interest.

I searched on "physics" in the ePals forum and this seemed like it might be interesting to you: A list on the internet for physics teachers called Physhare. Keith Tipton moderates it. Here's the link: http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=PHYSHARE

You can "join" the ePals Global Community for free, and you can get monitored email accounts for your students for free too. (called SchoolMail)

One feature is that ePals has TRUSTe certification, an independent statement of child safety and privacy of data. The district IT people care a lot about student privacy, so they look for TRUSTe on sites that teachers want to use.

If you create a collaborative physics project, post it on ePals in a Teacher Forum and see who will collaborate with you!

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Permalink Reply by Cecilia Tung on February 17, 2010 at 1:29pm

Thanks for this information, Rita. I'll definitely check out the links. Good to know that sites like ePals put a heavy emphasis on security. Sometimes it is difficult to know what sites to trust.

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