A Blog on Autobiographies!

For our Science Methods course, we were asked to write a blog that is an autobiography.  We were given a few main points that I would like to answer.  Here are the suggested topics we were given:

• What are the skills and strengths that you bring to the school science experience?
• There are different strengths that I bring to the school science experiment.  I can be a very creative person.  I think this is a great aspect for a science teacher to have because it will constantly motivate the students to explore the experiments given to them, and to even explore the world around them!  Having a creative teacher can make a student more aware of observing every day objects because they can always be used in a science experiment.
• What are the areas in which you would like to improve as you set about doing science with students?
• As I am doing science with students, I would like to improve my ability to  use technology in the classroom.  Since technology is always improving, it is important for educators to be up to date on all of the new tricks and tools to use in the classroom.
• How do you define “science” now as you prepare to teach it?
• I would define science as the world around me.  It is constantly changing which allows for students to learn new things all the time.
• How will technology help you stay current and teach science in an innovative way?
• Technology will help keep me and my students motivated and engaged throughout a science lesson.  It will connect us and allow the students to collaborate with one another for their science assignments.  
  

What Will be Non-Existant by 2020?

10 Years ago we never thought CD players would be replaced by iPods.  Now we are wondering what will be obsolete 10 years from now.  My professor e-mailed our class an article written by Ian Jukes yesterday with predictions of what would be extinct within the next decade.  The article is titled, "21 Things That Will Be Obsolete By 2020."  I could not believe what their predictions were!  I can't even imagine how much this will effect how and what we will be teaching in just a few years.

Paper--gone.  We are moving on to Kindles and paper-less classes.  Although this is Eco-friendly, I will miss the feeling of turning a page in a book or handing in an actual paper to be graded.  Well since there is no paper, Jukes says we are not even going to have a thing called homework!! Us, as educators will have to think of other ways to assess students with individual work I guess!  Computers will even not exist in 2020!?  Handheld devices will replace these dinosaur computers. 

Teachers who do not know how to incorporate technology to personalize their lessons will soon be out of a job.  This shows us the importance of practicing with technology now so we won't fall behind in the tech world later on.  Attendance offices will vanish within the next few years, Jukes says.  He believes that there will be bio scans to keep track of who is attending school.  This will save time in the classroom because we won't have to set aside time to take attendance, but I cannot imagine all parents being comfortable with this idea, or all children being brave enough to be body scanned by a foreign object. 

Schools will soon be educating not by grade but by learning level.  Schools will become more "home based" so they will be smaller and greener.  There will be less people on campuses at one time.  With this, Parent-Teacher conferences will be gone too.  Technology will make it easier for parents and teachers to continually connect with each other.

Although these are all just predictions made by one man, it should open our eyes as future educators to realize the importance of technology in the classroom.  We need to keep up-to-date with the ways education is changing.

If you want to read this article in full, just click here.

Four Fieldwork Sessions

My Science Methods course had recently begun our fieldwork sessions with Mrs. Benfer, the Science teacher for grades 3, 4, and 5 at our on-campus Elementary school, Bishop Dunn.  Our first session was a "Get to Know You" session where we met our student and began working with them.  I got Garret, a fifth grade genius, if you ask me.  He speeds through all of his work; faster than I can even think about it! 

On our second session, we worked on Test Prep together, where I assisted Garret along through questions he was prompted in his class' textbook.  I noticed Garret was not too enthused to be doing book work, and I don't blame him.  I tried to relate the topic to his every day experiences, connecting the material topics he is interested in.  Whenever I offered him an idea for a possible answer to a question to further his thinking, he would reply with, "Yes, but I believe we should put that in larger words so it sounds more Scientific and people will know I am smart."  Woah, I took a step back and realized that I wasn't needed as much as I had hoped.

On our third sesion together, Garret and I got the opportunity to work in an Inquiry lesson where he had the opportunity to explore his scientific world while creating a buoyancy boat that would hold the most pennies when placed in water.  Let's just say our first boat failed, but I loved how Garret was open to trying again and again until his boat was a success.  This kid is a persistant student!  I love how he never even thought of giving up.

Our fourth session together, which was our half-way point through our course's fieldwork process, I assisted Garret through his Chapter 11 test.  He flew through it, hoping to be the first one done and to have some down time to relax.  I did not allow this to happen.  I had him review his answers with me and give background knowledge for his answers so that I knew each answer was correct and that he actually knew the information instead of just spitting it out onto the paper.  He made a few silly mistakes and I was happy to see him realize that he needs to take his time during his assignments.

It touched my heart to see how upset Garret got when I told him that I would not see him on Monday because I will be attending my school's NCATE meeting (I will blog about this experience after Monday; I am honored to be invited to such an event!).  He was looking forward to working with me again, but I reassured him that I would be back the Wednesday following; there was no need to worry.  He was even more excited when he found out I would actually be teaching the Chemical Change lesson with my Science group!  I absolutely cannot wait.

April Fools!

Over the past week, I have heard rumor after rumor about our area of New York being hit with over ten inches of snow!  I couldn't believe it!  I thought Mother Nature must have been playing an April Fools joke on us.  I woke up this morning expecting a Winter Wonderland on the first day of April and actually pleased to take note that it was mearly drizzling outside.  With a sigh of relief, I went off to a session of Methods of Science fieldwork, where I took a Science test with my fifth grade student, Garret.  After fieldwork was over, I went to class and then went straight to the library.  Being focused in my work, I didn't even think to look out the window. 

Once I decided to take a break from my studies and take a little walk around the building, I noticed huge snowflakes falling from the sky!  Who would have thought that today, the first day of April, it would be blizzarding out!  I am still in shock.  What a silly way to end yet another hectic week of my Spring 2011 semester.  Hopefully by this time next week it will be nice and sunny out!  We can only hope...

Wacky Weather on another Manic Monday

Since Spring has just begun, I became excited about the warm weather that would be arriving soon.  Little did I know, we became bombarded with snow this morning!  It was something I definitely was not expecting!  I woke up, looked out my window and saw a layer of snow blanketing the grass; it was quite a disappointment because I then had to walk to my Spanish class in the freezing cold snow!  As the day progressed, my Science Methods course had fieldwork at the elementary school on campus.  I didn't even want to know how much snow had accumulated since I had last been outside!  The temperature increased as the day moved on and the snow abruptly turned into rain, washing and melting all of the unwanted snow away.  Hopefully that was the last of the snow for this year, but who knows!  This has been one crazy winter.

Reflecting on the Past to Improve the Future

While answering discussion questions online for my paperless Science Methods for Childhood Education course, I started to think about a Science lesson I distinctly remember from my fifth grade class when I was in elementary school. 

My Science Methods class was posed with this question:  As part of her class’s exploration of atoms, Ms. Murray has the students work with “mystery boxes” containing everyday objects. Did you ever have a science lesson in which you had to try to identify or describe something you couldn’t see? In what ways does this kind of lesson build students’ scientific skills?
I never had the opportunity to partake in a Science lesson that used a mystery box but I do vividly remember working with a mystery mixture.  My fifth grade Science teacher was teaching us how to make observations, predictions and hypothesis.  She created mixtures in Dixie cups for each student that contained water and babypowder.  She made it a point not to tell us was the mixture consisted of because she wanted us to create our own predictions from our oberservations.  We used the three out of the five senses (sight, smell and touch) to determine what this mixture was made of.  We learned that the safest way to smell something that we were unsure of its make-up was to "woft" the smell.  The class also learned the importance to never taste or digest a material we were unsure of incase it was poisonous. 

We started fieldwork today, and the fifth grade class we are working with is learning about mixtures.  I could definitely use this experiment in my lesson plan I am going to create to teach the students about experimenting and dealing with unknown mixtures.

This is definitely an idea for a lesson that I could use in my future classroom to teach about observations.  Thinking back on a lesson that has left an impression on my life professionally is something that I will carry with me throughout my journey at becoming an elementary educator.

This lesson also ties in with our previous week's main topic, which was messyness.  The title to this person's blog seems as though the experiment did not go as planned, but the children had fun and learned new things anyways.  Here is a link to someone's Tumblr page I found who did a similar experiment with a young boy.  They posted pictures of the babypowder and water creation and their observations, pretty cool stuff!! 

Jig-Saw Activity--A Great Way To Get Students to Learn Interactively!

Last week, my Methods of Science Education class focused on creating a mock Jig-Saw activity.  We split up into groups of five where we each determined one of the five kingdoms to research on our own.  Then, we created new groups, our "expert groups."  In these groups, we all had the same kingdom and we shared, via GoogleDocs, the information we gathered to make sure we all had similar information.  After the "expert groups" reviewed their shared information and created a worksheet for the rest of their original groups, we all taught our groups about our kingdoms we studied.  We took notes on our laptops during everyone's lessons into our Jot Charts via Microsoft Word.  After our class was over, our teacher assigned us to take an online quiz where we were asked to save our desktop image and upload it to our blogs!

I really enjoyed this activity and will use it in my future classroom.  I thought it was a great idea because students learn the most when they teach others.  It was also a great way to teach students the importance of good note-taking skills because there was an online quiz to be followed afterward.  The online quiz is a great way to assess the students' learning from this lesson.  I loved this assignment and thought it was great to get students motivated about a certain topic because they are to be considered "experts" in that field.  

Here are the results from my online quiz about the 5 Kingdoms.  As you can see, it was a great learning experience because I received a perfect score for my quiz!

Here is the link to the quiz, maybe you could take the quiz and realize the importance of the Jig-Saw activity and learning from peers! :) The Kingdoms of Life.