Edheads- Activate Your Mind

Edheads.org

Edheads is a free online educational resource that provides teachers and students with an alternative form of teaching and learning, in a virtual format. Science and math games are specifically designed to engage students and take the content knowledge that they know and apply it to the real world situations that students are asked to solve on this website. These activities promote critical thinking and inspire students to be creative. On this site, students can play games that allow them to simulate a car crash and review crime scene evidence, design a cell phone and even perform hip replacement surgery. This website really brings learning alive! Students can engage in fun games, but also see how careers in STEM are obtainable. All activities meet state and national standards. And teachers can assign different games to supplement their classroom instruction. In all of the games, there are several ways that students can solve the problems that are presented to them. This allows all students, representing all learning styles, to access their knowledge and be successful.

Edhead partners with different universities and school systems throughout the United States, which helps them research, design, and test out activities every step of the way. The website features diverse characters and focuses on STEM. Minorities such as women, and people of color are featured on the site, allowing students from underrepresented groups to see that folks like them can be successful in STEM fields.

Wideo

What is Wideo?

Wideo is an online video making service that provides a free, easy to use service. The site offers many tools for creating your own personalized video. These services include: adding outside images, adding Wideo pre-made images, creating personalized text, sound integration, animating images and text, and pre-made templates.

Why use Wideo?

First and foremost, Wideo is free to use. There are premium options on Wideo that allow users to download and save copies of their work, but these are purely optional. Wideo also supplies free web based storage of videos that were created, as long as you have an account with them. These features, along side the many others that Wideo provides, make it an extremely practical tool for the classroom.

Educational uses:

Wideo could be used by teachers and students alike. Some examples of the usefulness for teachers are as follows: creating eye catching videos that help engage students, organizing multiple videos for a single lesson, and providing a way for teachers to publish segments of lessons online for the students to review. Uses for students are as follows: creating video projects that accurately reflect the understanding of a concept, viewing provided material outside of the classroom, and creating video projects that can be shared with other members of the classroom to further understanding. 

Personal review:

I found that the Wideo software was easy to use and enjoyable. The videos that I created are something that could be used to introduce students to terminology that will be elaborated upon later in the course. They could also be used as a short review for major concepts in the class. I personally found Wideo to be a valuable resource that could be made even more valuable by encouraging students to use it. The only real downside to Wideo is that it costs money to be able to download videos, or to upload them to YouTube.

My Wideo: 

Mitosis_Wideo

Glogster

 

Glogster is a website that students can go to to upload images, graphics, audio, video and texts and arrange them on a single page to create multimedia posters. Glogpedia content is intended for use in place of or alongside conventional curriculum texts, as interactive research material or to engage learners with a new topic.   This website is free for students, all they need to to do is to consult their teachers and get the code so they can make their own glogster. This is a great website where the students can go to and express their own individuality when it comes to making a multimedia presentation or poster on this website.  Teachers can grade this and not have to worry about losing them because they are all in one place on the computer and you do not have to worry about paper copies.

 There are thousands glogster's already available on the website so students can look at these as examples and then make their own presentation/poster. Users can also save editable copies of glogs to their own dashboards, and adapt them to their own needs.  It is available in multiple languages so the students in your classroom that English is not their first language can use this too so they are not left out when it comes to doing this project.   

Since I am going to be a middle school science teacher I can ask the students to do the projects on science topics like genetics, the human body, space, and other topics you might see in a science class.  This would be a great opportunity to get to know your students more.  You can find out their interests, likes, dislikes, what they like or hate about school, and other things like that. Since the students are middle school students you have to watch out and tell them exactly what they can and can not put on the presentation/poster.  

Ideas you can use this in the classroom
- another way to evaluate kids
- spice things up for the students
- get to know the students
- keep parents connected
-  classroom frequently accessed sites 
- assessments
-biographies
- homework 
-and much more

 Many if not all middle school science standards can be used for this presentation/poster that the students do so that the teachers can get to know the students or so they can evaluate the students.  I wish I was in middle school because this seems like a great teaching tool and this is a fun way for students to show their teachers and other students what they know about a particular subject.  Soon technology will take over how we teach so we need to include it in our teaching so we get used to it and so the students will be familiar with technology when they use it in their other classes.  

Starting the 5E Learning Cycle: the ENGAGE Phase

After discussing how we can use our knowledge of the science of learning to help students understand science concepts better, we created summarizing concept maps of the Chapter 10 "Learning in the Middle and High School Classroom" reading (Chiappetta, E. L. & Koballa, Jr., T. R. (2010). Science Instruction in the Middle and Secondary Schools: Developing Fundamental Knowledge and Skills for Teaching; 7th Edition. Allyn & Bacon). Students took photos of the concept maps and shared them on Yogile.com (use the password "scienceed" to check them out!). Please note that albums in the free version of this webtool are deleted after 14 days, so it may not be available anymore when you check. Here are a couple of examples too:

Taylor's Concept Map

Dylan and Brett's Map

The Chapter 10 discussion was followed by a look at the Abell and Brown article titled  Examining the Learning Cycle (2007). Students each came up with one key point from the article. They shared these via Today's Meet and here was the list they came up with:



We will explore the 5E Learning Cycle in the weeks to come, starting with the ENGAGE phase. To get thinking about this, students practice an example of an activity that could be used to start the topic of DNA Technology. They had to use black and green playdough to create a genetically engineered organism. This not only got them interested in the topic (or "hooked") but also uncovered preconceptions about what genetically engineered organisms are. The instructor took photos of their creations and shared them with students again on Yogile.com (see them below if the album has expired). Their GE organisms ranged from camels with photosynthetic eyeballs to a snake with rabbit ears.

After looking at other examples of activities / games/ photos that could be used as the Engage phase, students came up with their own. They shared them on the Padlet wall below and we compared the different approaches students took for presenting some of the same topics.

Created with Padlet

Discrepant Event Lesson

Discrepant events are a great way to start an inquiry-based learning cycle. Discrepant events leave students puzzled and wanting to find out more about what happened. If you want to learn more about discrepant events as a teaching strategy, here is a good summary. There are plenty of resources out there with ideas for discrepant events. Check out our LiveBinder tab for some starting points. Lots of critical thinking going on and some fun in our discrepant events lesson in Science Methods the other day... via Photopeach

Online Gaming in the Classroom

Why Online Games? 

 

Online gaming has negative attention for being addictive, time consuming and non-educational. But what if we simply were not using this technology to its full potential? 

Most teenage students would prefer to play a game than sit and listen to a teacher talk at them for an hour and thirty minutes. With revolutionary technology evolving constantly students are becoming more distracted by said technology in the classrooms. So why not use them to engage students and emphasize key points of learning developing toward mastery? 

Benefits

An online game is a game that is played over a computer network, or the internet. Most can now be accessed a variety of ways including:

• Computers or Laptops
• Smart Phones
•  Tablets

By using these technologies to access online games students can become engaged in an interactive atmosphere (while also having an excuse to use the technology they are so fond of).

Examples

How in-depth and interactive an educational online game is depends on the learning target and the duration of the game. Some games are fast paced and can come to an end within a few minutes whereas others may take multiple playing periods for a conclusion to feel more like a real online game and to enable critical thinking. 

Cell Craft is an example of an online game that can take a longer period to play. In the game you are actively constructing a cell starting as a single-celled organism containing only a centrosome and plasma membrane. Throughout  each step the major organelles and biomolecules are explained to help the student build the cell which furthers understanding of the content. There are roughly 8 sections to be played but this is what the first section would look like when students play this game. 

 An example of a shorter online game would be Extinct! Are You Smarter Than a Plant? which happens to be a strategy-based game. The game can be as long or as short as the student wants depending on the strategies taken to insure the survivability of a plant species. The link to this game can be found below.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Harissa/extinct-are-you-smarter-than-a-plant

Final Thoughts

It is almost crucial with the abundance of technology today and student interest in the cyber world to utilize the internet for student engagement and mastery learning. If we can't hold student attention by traditional methods then making the shift to accommodate a technology dependent generation should prove beneficial. The important thing to note here is that online games should not be used to replace teaching but rather act as a supplement to support mastery learning. 

Useful Resources

• Cell Craft

• Extinct! Are You Smarter Than a Plant? 

• Kongregate: Free Games Online

• Science Game Center

Youtube in the Classroom

YouTube

YouTube is an online video website. Most videos on YouTube are music videos, vlogs, commercials, or other videos. Anyone with a google account can create a channel. YouTube can become a wonderful tool in the classroom if used appropriately. 

Some ways to use YouTube in the Classroom:

YouTube is full of short informative videos and vlogs that can act as a hook for lessons.

• Videos like this are examples of ways to get students excited about 
• The investigation of chemical properties. 
• Or genetics 
• Or even bringing Soccer into the classroom with physics
• The science of weather, like snowflakes!
• Investigating their world. 

Youtube can also act as a great refresher or recap for students on the prior knowledge they need to recall for the upcoming lesson. 

• Channels like Crash-Course or Khan Academy are a great place to go!
• Students can watch a video about Electron Configuration or Mitosis

Youtube can also be used to help struggling students keep up.

• Providing students with additional content in a very accessible form can assist students in developing their knowledge of content. Like the parts of a cell 
• Teachers can even create their own YouTube Channels to create videos for struggling students. This could also be a way to provide parents examples of what material is being discussed in the classroom

Youtube videos can be used to start discussions in the classroom about current events that are related to science. 

• For example, a debate on vaccines
• Or a debate on if global warming is the biggest threat to human life

There is a multitude of opportunities that Youtube videos offers students and teachers, we must simply just find them!

Some Great Channels To Start With Include:

Khan Academy

Crash Course

Minute Physics

Minute Earth 

Periodic Videos

Ted-ED

PBS

Soul Pancake

Veritasium