I am SO lucky! I’m at a Distance Education school where, flipped learning is pretty much the norm. However, until recently students have been asked to read long amounts of text in science.
This is no more as far as I’m concerned.
Yesterday, the day that changed my educational future, I discovered an invaluable web tool called Video Scribe. And began making awesome looking videos instantly.
MY FIRST VIDEOSCRIBE VIDEO on SIMPLE MACHINES:
Taking advice from the greats of video lessons I made sure that it was:
- less than 5 minutes long
- catchy and relevant to my students
- focused on lower order thinking skills (knowledge and understanding).
Enjoy the first video I produced and I will be making all my video lessons available on my website under “For Teachers“.
OR: I’ve just scrapped everything I’m doing this year for something WAY MORE AWESOME
There is nothing worse than attending an incredible professional development as a teacher and then carrying on with your routine as though nothing has changed.
I have decided – NOT THIS TIME!
I was absolutely determined to make use of the incredible week I had at STEMX in Canberra as soon as possible.
Have a look at my year plan: mushing PBL and STEM together to make one beautifully awesome educational baby.
Rough Driving Questions in the order which students will be asked to do them:
1) Devise a Rube Goldberg machine that takes at least 1 minute to run that, when videoed will deliver the message of “welcome to Year 9 Science”. (Audience: each other, and current Year 8s) (Approx 2 weeks)
2) How could you use what you learned at the Observatory to create a device that improves your mobile phone reception for under $20? (Audience: Observatory staff) (Approx 8 weeks)
3) Using a programming software of your choice, model aspects of ecosystem interactions in the form of a game that will be presented to primary school students in years 5 and 6. (Audience: Local primary school) (Approx 5 weeks)
4) Prototype methods of mitigating tsunamis that are triggered by the warning signs of tsunamis and design a scientific experiment to test their effectiveness. (Audience: Geoscience Australia) (Approx 5 weeks)
5) Measure the happiness and wellbeing of your local community and create a plan to improve this by 2020. (Headspace) (Approx 5 weeks)
6) Create and refine a unique recipe that utilises at least two chemical reactions with evidence of experimenting with different ingredients, proportions and cooking methodologies to produce the desired product. (Audience: local TAFE Cookery students) (Approx 7 weeks)
7) Create a piece of artwork that is based on a scientific concept that you have studied this year which incorporates the use of electrical circuits. The design must allow you to give a three minute presentation explaining how you made it and the scientific concept you are illustrating. (Audience, parents and community members) (Approx 8 weeks)
What do you think?
So many of you will already be aware that there isn’t one scientific method. The one we usually learn and teach about however, goes a bit like this:
Looks familiar right? Now remember when I said there isn’t only one scientific method, let’s consider the field of epidemiology. In epidemiology which is a branch of biology we try to understand human diseases, how they originate, how they spread, what are some factors that predetermine the acquisition of disease and so on. Now it’s really frowned upon to do experiments on people. For example, we can’t PROVE that smoking causes lung cancer because we can’t say “Oi, you 30 people, come over here and smoke for the next 20 years of your life and we’ll see if you get lung cancer, and you 30 over there, you’re fine just don’t smoke”. I’m sure you can see how ridiculous that would be!
So how do we get around this problem? Well by a lot of observation. Epidemiology relies on life already carrying out the method and results, and epidemiologists just go out and try to observe people and find patterns. It’s a very complicated but extremely fascinating process that relies very much on statistics. I might do a post on the bell curve if I get a chance – it’s actually really cool.
So anyway, here is a template you can use with high school students to scaffold for them the (traditional) scientific method.
Can you think of another situation where the classical scientific method doesn’t hold true?
Scaffolding Scientific Method