Reflections of a Techie

Finding evidence in all the lab data & using scientific argumentation

Distinguishing evidence from all the data is a tough skill to learn

One of the hardest skills for a 6th grade to learn is scientific argumentation....and a big part of that skill is knowing what is the evidence to support your conclusion.  We worked on that when we did the "Does Air Have Mass" lab.  Sadly as I read student conclusions, I realized they were not consistently using what they had learned from their experimentation.  They were relying on what they believed or what they thought would happen.

Reading professional journals and learning from other teacher's experience helps

Fortunately I had just read "Data Versus Evidence" in the most recent Science Scope magazine by Mary Grace Viillanueva and Brian Hand.  They did an excellent job of finding an analogous situation that would make sense for a 6th grader.  The authors suggested using the student's familiarity with police shows where detectives must take an abundance of information and figure out which pieces of evidence help find the criminal.  The article has a wonderful suggested activity which I will incorporate the next time I start this process, but I was able to shorten and do the whole thing in about 3-4 minutes.  (This is an image from my SmartBoard that I was able to export as an image file...something I find incredibly helpful when sending copies of notes to special ed teachers or to help a student that is return from an absence.)

Quickly students were able to use this graphic organizer to sort through their information....break it into data and evidence.  I scribed their thinking in a blog post for the science class.  I think it helped them to write this post....one sentence at a time they would describe and then we'd figure out how to write it down.  We're not there but we are on the way.

Taking a good idea, customizing it and making it even better for my students and my classroom

This article was a huge help and it reinforced my existing belief that it's the processing you do after the lab that is most critical to building science understanding.  I was able to take what I'd learned from a previous lesson outcome and use that to create a better learning experience this time.

The other thing I realized was that students didn't know how to write a conclusion sentence.  To help them out, I wrote a "frame" to help them learn where and how to use the evidence.  This was still hard for them.

As we read aloud the conclusions, though, it seemed like most people were figuring it out.  Lots of erasing and re-writing....but I think that's what learning is all about.

Inquiring young scientist want to know...does air have mass?

Simple question?

But for students that aren't used to figuring out how they'll investigate something, it's a tough question to put to them.  They have been conditioned to want steps to follow, they want contant re-assurance they're doing it "right" and they want to know that they'll find the right answer.

Be brave!!!

What kind of comment is that to a science class?  It's the best advice that I can give them.  Because it's OK to try something and not have it work out the first time.  Despite lots of read alouds that tell the stories of scientists working for years to have "something come out right", students don't think it all that trying applies to them.   They believe that they should follow the steps I give them and it will be perfect.

So imagine how freaked they were when I asked them to show that air has mass...giving them only balloons, meter sticks, string and tacks.  It's as close to inquiry science as I dare to go at this point because I can't set them loose to find everything on their own.  Even with this help they were frustrated and confused.  They talked and fiddled.  I asked them leading questions. Eventually one by one, each lab pair figured out something to try.

It just took one or two pairs to be brave and try something.  Bravery spread throughout the room and soon everyone had some idea they wanted to try out.  I tapped into that kindergarten curiousity and boldness.  And try they did....all sorts of contraptions to test out their ideas if air has mass.  Some were trying to figure it out in buckets of water, some with balloons and string, and some built some very elaborate scales/balances. 

I never did figure out how this proves that air has mass, but I'm determined to go back and listen to them explain it to me again tomorrow. Ask more questions and see if they have something that my head just doesn't comprehend.

 

 

 

 

This measuring device stayed up better and the student attached the balloons using string loops.  It was a clever way to control the balloon and be precise about how far from the ends she was putting the items she was measuring.

 

 

 

It took this lab pair almost the entire hour to build their scale.  Then they had to figure out how to overcome the problem of putting a deflated and inflated balloon on the balance at the exact same time.  Needless to say, you had to be quick if you wanted to see their experiment.  But I give them all props for perserverance and effort....plus they did demonstrate that air has mass.

 

 

Air does have mass....I can attest to seeing many lab pairs successfully demonstrate this. 

And more than that, I think students had a learning experience where tinkering with something to try and make it work was OK.  I had them record any modifications they made to their original plan on their lab sheet....and we'll talk more about if not getting it "right" on the first try is wrong....or is it a first attempt.

I think that will be the hugest (and I don't even know if it's a word but it applies to the learning situation here) thing I could teach my students.  Go for it.  Make a reasonable stab at creating something you think will work....learn from what happens....regroup....redesign....and go again. 

Until you can show that air has mass.   :->

 

 

 

 

Our class discoveries about Google Docs & a new way to work.

Update:  We've been doing more and more with Google Docs and students are getting much more comfortable with the sharing function.  It's quite amazing to see the progress in just a few short weeks....from "I need help" with everything to "Come and look at what I found out about, come here!"

My big ah-ha was that they just needed practice, practice and practice.  Not any different than another tool you might be teaching to 11 and 12 year olds.  I think they like the new ways of working on worksheets.

I'm going to try sharing a document with them that is all on  Google Docs...it  will be a test review.  We'll co-author it during class using a shell where I've provided the page numbers and notes references...they'll go and find them, we'll summarize them as a class in a Google Doc that we'll all share....and then how well that works for them to essentially create their own study guide as a whole class.

It's a fairly standard homework assignment to ask students to do some background reading and bring facts into the next day's discussion.  I decided to keep the learning but incorporate some high tech means for capturing those facts and archiving them.

The best part of doing an electronic worksheet like this is that everything is readily available for the entire class to read, see and access whenever they need it.  We've had a blast reading through the facts and it has been good for students to hear the oooooo's and ahhhhh's as one of their "better" facts amazes classmates.  Some of my most quiet students have been recognized for their effort and that never happens when we do this learning in the traditional way.

I created a Google Docs spread sheet that was very straightforward....name, fact and source.  Each student was to upload their favorite Sun facts into the document that I created and "shared" with them via a URL.

Kids were pysched and as we entered the computer lab to get started, I could feel their excitment.  Now I will say that a few students grumbled about why they could just do it the old fashion way because it was much easier, but for the most part everyone was anxious to learn how.  They are just beginning on Google Docs and, while I've used Google Docs with adults, I'd never done anything wide scale with students.

In the lab, they logged into the accounts and everything went smoothly.  The panic and trouble started when they went home and tried to do their homework.  Server error, they couldn't cut and paste into the cells, and a million other things went wrong.  The HELPDESK didn't know why and went to work solving the problem...but meanwhile my students were panicked that they couldn't finish their homework. 

One of the best things I did was to have daily brainstorming times in class.  I'd have students that had been successful in getting their facts loaded into the spreadsheet talk about it and answer their peers questions.  In some cases I knew what they were saying was a good solution and in other cases, students had ideas and solutions I would have never come up with.  We were co-learners in debugging the problems so many people were having.

They came in early, stayed late and skipped lunch to work with me...and it worked perfectly at school.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Finally the HELPDESK suggested that I double check students were logging into their accounts and then opening the spreadsheet.  So we took a bit of classtime time and generated a class email to the people who were still stuck....they entered their emails and we wrote a reminder note to open email account first and then open the file and I gave them another "clean" URL link to use.  Same one I originally put in the assignment but just in case.  It solved the problem for all but one student (and he was staying in a hotel because his home has suffered extensive water damage) who was later able to complete the assignment in less than 5 minutes once he got to my classroom computers.

While we had 2 days of panic and frustration, we all decided it was a great learning experience.  Next time we'll be better at knowing steps to take in order not to run into the same roadblocks....but I'm sure there will be new ones.  Hopefully, though, students are beginning to realize that we can find a way around them and we can be a team in solving them together.  Plus we got to know amazing facts about the Sun.

Photo provided under CC Attribution License http://www.flickr.com/photos/37103425@N00/371515143/

Easy as 1-2-3: Creating pencast about unequal heating of earth

I've been worrying how my students will study for next quiz over the unequal heating of earth's surface.  I've drawn diagrams in class, had them paste in diagrams we created and still I wonder what they'll do when I'm not there to explain it again.  Heck I've been teaching this grade level for many years and I know they'll think they know it until they get home and then it will >>>> puff<<<<<<< magically disappear.

So I'm using my Echo pen to make a pencast with another explanation they can download and listen to at home.  OK....maybe it wasn't quite as Easy as 1-2-3...but it was darn close to that easy.  I think if I just use the resource more I won't forget all the steps and I'll be all set.

Unequal Heating Of Earth's Surface
brought to you by Livescribe

I tried drawing it first but that didn't work so well because I had double lines when I did the audio.  So next I tried slipping the drawing I'd done underneath my blank page but I could see it.  Finally I ripped the page out of the notebook and held it up on the patio door (like a lightbox).  I can hear a couple of mistakes I make in the audio because I'm trying to hold the paper up, speak coherently and draw.....that's a lot for me.  But I think overall it works.

Three things to learn from the research part of PBL

Reading 120+ sets of research notes gives you loads of insight about what students learned, where they had problems and where they excelled.  It's first-class feedback for me, as the teacher and designer, about this unit.

Evaluating what they learned

I can see where students maxed out their searching, writing and learning so they could answer their Focus Question.   Here's where most of the 120 kids excelled...probably because they were answering questions that interested them.

You can see how this student is working at comparing the difference between the kinds of tusks mastodons, mammoths and moeritheriums  had....that's what piqued his group's interest.  One of the research notes that made me chuckle aloud was mammoths don't have cracked teeth while mastodon teeth have cracks....why?  because mammoths mostly ate grass while mastodons ate tree branches.  Who knew?  All my 6th graders now understand that the fact and I hope it wins them a $1,000,000 on Jeporady sometime.

Reading this also reminded me how out of touch I am about what interests middle school kids.  Most of their Team Focus questions, I would have never picked or thought about.  Yet here all these amazing questions and I can see how hard they worked to find out the answers to their questions.

They helped me define three by which I would judge their notes:  comprehensiveness, how well what they collected helped the team answer their question, and originality of their research (ie they didn't copy their notes from someone else).  I just made up a checklist where I could evaluate these three things and then jot a small note.

Things I need to improve on next time

1. Create a checkpoint earlier in the project where I look over these notes as a prequisite to moving onto the product phase.  I could tell some of my students didn't do their part because their notes were too sparse and incomplete.  If I had caught this earlier, I could have required them to  continue reading and researching.
2. Improve my mini-lessons on notetaking. I should take more time to define what I think the notes should look like when they're finished and get that firmly in my mind and design the lessons that will help students get there.  Sometimes they clearly ran out material or just stopped looking....and restated what they had already written down again and again and again.

Next week we'll do a reflection where they have to use these notes to actually write an answer to their Team Focus question in class and they'll rate their experience with teamwork, creativity and time management.   So these three measures...the research notes & reflection, their product presentation and the unit test will be my comprehensive measure of how well this unit succeeded.

Mini-scientists....uncovering the mastodon dig

For a change of pace today, we took a breather in all our activities and I decided that I would show students the video that the Discovery Channel made about the mastodons.  I'm not much for using lots of longer videos...but this is a good exception.  Mastodons in your Backyard explains how a family found mastodon bones which led to a local scientist along with many, many volunteers uncovered one of the most intact mastodon skeleton ever discovered.  And this video helps students to see what part they are playing as Citizen Scientsts.

 

 

What was so much fun was that students began to recognize the large Ziploc bags.....

"Hey those are like the bags we had our marl in".....

"Hey are they talking about a place like where our mastodon came from?"

"Hey wait a minute,"......and they'd sort of re-group...."that IS our mastodon!!"

"No way....that's our project!!"

They were so excited.  As they watched the video, they recognized many of the details and ideas they had gathered in their own research.

Here students are creating a comparison between mastodons & mammoths

Most wished they had the chance to talk to the scientists that ran the project because now they really have questions.  This group wants to discuss how they compared the mastodons and the mammoths. And students appreciated  how the scientists wanted to share the discovery of this mastodon with others....and in particular with classroom like ours.

One student asked me...."does that make us mini-scientists?"  I think it does!!!

Once again I learn that asking students to do real work affirms them and gives them loads of motivation.  Watching their faces as they saw the mastodon skeleton rise up out of the muddy dig site showed me they were 100% involved.  And they could imagine doing that kind of work when they grow up.  Now I just have to wait about 15 years to see if any become paleontologists.

 

3 things to remember at end of PBL project

It's our last week at this work as students finish up their projects, put the last touches on their presentations and start studying for their scientific method unit test.  What I observed is a real focused investment of time and energy....I was almost un-needed because the classes knew what they needed to get done.  And they were doing it.    I'll have to admit that I totally cracked up with this group.  They had invested how large mastodon tusks actually were....and then built to scale models of them. Two of the students worked together because their life-size tusk was too big for just one person to manage.   They matched the length and diameter of the tusks for mastodons, mammoths and moritheas.....they went so far as to show the "rings" of the tusks in a cross section which reveals what conditions were present in that mastodon's life.  Much like you would see in tree rings, these same kinds of growth patterns can be seen in tusks.  they had a blast doing the whole project and now are dragging these tusks home on the bus to finish painting them....they are so excited.

I'm thrilled with their excitment don't worry.  But I'm even prouder of their commitment to excellence...the time they invested in finding out about those tusks and then figuring out how to build these layers into their model.  It wasn't easy....many layers of newspapers, masking tape and coat hangers (because I won't let them buy new stuff since recycling is green and it pretty much puts everyone on an even playing field). 

It was a very self-directed room.

Students went back to our driving questions board where we collected all the post-its that related to the class question just to make sure that their team question fit and would be finished on time.

In order to set that up, I walked through the next two weeks of calendar with them.  I thought if they could get a sense of all the upcoming due dates (yes again), it would help them priortize without me having to direct each day.  As a whole class, we wrote in communal due dates and then each team looked at what was left to do and they added in their team due dates.  When they finished that effort, I then had them transfer the big dates onto the monthly overview calendars.  They are using their planner's weekly calendars to keep track of the details of their work and the monthly calendar to get a bird's eye view.  Hopefully this will let them zoom in and zoom out in their thinking.

There's still lots to do.  I haven't yet gotten permission to have our museum in the grade level pod.  If we can't do that, we'll have our museum in the room.  The art teacher is going to help students assemble the mural....they are staging all the pieces on tables inside my room and will work with her to learn how to attach everything so it won't fall off the wall.  (A key thing since there's lots of traffic in this hallway everyday.) 

Here's the second important thing to have near the end....a passion about being excellent.  They now get that their product has to show exactly what they're thinking.  It's why they've drafting their placards, revised and then done it all again.  Once they saw high quality models, they have been working towards re-creating that standard in their own work.

We have to work on the study guide for the unit test....students have helped me write the questions that cover  What is a testable question? and Is this a testable question?---writing lots of examples and then leading the class review.....Explaining and showing the difference in quantitative and qualitative data.....Is this a question for science? where students must decide if the question applies to science or to some other kind of investigation. 

This is where the curriculum that is tested fits in with everything I'm doing along with all the time managment/organizational/teamwork objectives I'm fulfilling.  It's the piece that I thought was missing in my paradigm of PBL before I did this unit.  Now I see....we had 3 weeks of hard-core scientific investigation with the soil and data collection....another week of building driving questions and morphing those into testable questions for science.....and a final week of "fun" where they transformed their questions into presentations which they decided was to be a museum.  Now we'll have another week of mixed stuff (a little presentation and a little test review games).

Layering. Layering the 3 big things...passion for their projects, curriculum and  a real commitment to excellence.  It's all about the layering. 

 

Why hurricanes? Easy as 1-2-3 if you use Google Earth and data

Teaching patterns in science is critical.  Two years ago I realized that hurricane season started about the same time as school started for me.  Ever since then, I've been using the National Hurricane Center as my primary textbook.  The 2011 season hasn't been disappointing.  I presented this map to my entering 6th graders

There wasn't a huge data set but they still could see a bit of a pattern.  We've been monitoring the hurricanes and tropical storms that have developed since mid-August.

By the end of August, we added more data and here's what the map looked like.

And so they feel like they know what's going to happen by the end of August.  Just about that time two big storms came up and we followed their progression on a daily basis....Irene and Katia helped students solidify their beliefs.

By mid September, our map looks like this.  It is how the 2011 Hurricane season looks in the Atlantic Ocean so far.

My students want to know why

• how all storms seem to start off the eastern coast of Africa....what's going on there to cause all these storms to happen
• why do they curve as they get close to landfall...what changes
• why do hurricanes seem to stay close to the equator
• what's more important---the wind or the land or the ocean (most think it's going ocean since all the storms happen over the ocean and the land seems to make them break apart...and they believe that the wind would be the same whether over land or sea)

This is why teaching patterns is so important to teaching science.  Already my students are asking pretty sophisticated questions about hurricane formation and behavior for 11 year olds.  And it's through the power of Google Earth and the excellent data that the National Hurricane Center provides for the public that I can get the data sets to use so easily.

It's how the technology tool disappears because students are so busy thinking about the science.  I believe this is how all technology should be utilized as an instructional tool...something that allows me to show students the weather unit from a new perspective that they wouldn't have gotten without the technology.

As soon as they take their unit test over the Scientific Method, I'm going to have a blast starting the weather unit with all this pattern finding they've already done.  Their questions will drive us learning about convection currents, heat transfer and density.  It will be wonderful.

Finding collaborating classrooms--Skype and other possibilities

I'm always thinking about the next unit even if I'm in the middle of another unit.  Projects can take time to setup and especially if you're trying to anticipate where you'll find collaborators.  I've been searching for classrooms that seem to be interested in weather and/or who has experienced weather different from  the Midwest USA.

Watch this amazing video...I'm calling this my inspiration video.  Now to find a partnership classroom somewhere to do this kind of work.  Earthquakes are always a challenge since we don't have many in Kansas, but I think this kind of learning exchange would make it more relevant to my classes for sure.

 

USA to Chile: a classroom exchange on earthquakes from Skype in the classroom on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Villa Maria Academy's Lower School in Immaculta, PA for this amazing example of creative learning.  Not only was the work you did very rigorous, but also the video you made was very professional.

Have you done a Skype Classroom exchange?  How did it go?  I've done a couple of students were excited and very interested.  One of my biggest hurdles is lining up enough interactions.  I have 4 sections of science classes....while I could combine some, it seems impractical to try and do this with 120 kids.  How do people find multiple classes with whom to Skype? 

Do you have tips you could share with me?  I did an exchange last year and it was fun..some audio problem....but I thought it would have been even better if it had last longer than the 20 minutes we had and I almost wish students could have been sharing small group to small group.  While we prepared and had questions, I'm just wondering about optimal size.

Most of my exchanges have been with classrooms where the timezone difference was huge.  But I'd love to venture out further.  I know, though, trying to Skype with folks from Australia was tough because when it's 5am in Kansas it's 8pm in Australia.  I don't see how we could Skype with classrooms there because they would have to stay up all night to see us during the day or vice versa.  How have you worked around time zone problems?

Love this video and yet I have so many questions.

PBL makes for a hectic but wonderful day

Another hectic, busy workday in Room66.  While our shake jar settle, students are putting to work all that they've researched about this 9000 year old timeperiod from books, the internet and other sources of information.

Here's the place where they're stepping away from my required lesson plan and my checklist of "Have To Do's" (you know those curriculum pieces that I was hired to teach).  Here's where they are asking and answering the questions about this mastodon or time period that interests them.  Here's where we hook 'em with things that interest them.

I'm loving it.

They're loving it.

It's working.

They decided that they wanted to show their research...much like a museum might.  They decided to build exhibits.

Here one of the groups is busy trying to build the layers of a mastodon.  They've gotten bits of wire that are bending into the shape of the skeleton, then (as you can see the girl in the green shirt doing) they are layering on the tissue of the mastodon.  To be followed, after the tissue layer dries, with the hairy coat.  It was this hairy coat that got the whole thing rolling.  They wanted to know how this coat helped them survive the cold times without being too hot in the warm times.  So they've read and read....and looked at tons of pictures/videos on the subject.  Now they're trying to build a model that is half a mastodon so you can see inside the creature to understand.

These might look like egg cartons to you...but they're in the process of being transformed into mastodon teeth.

This group studied what mastodons and mammoths ate.  They are using the egg cartons as the base for the mastodon teeth which they will contrast with a different kind of model to the mammoth teeth.  Again...this is their idea and their creation.  It's very nifty...even though they forgot to bring a paint brush and they had to make shift one out of an old sponge I found under my sink!!!!

This is my high energy group and they were busy with plaster of paris.  Boy was I nervous.  Nervous they'd forget and dump it down the sink and it would plug up.

They didn't and I eventually relaxed.

What they were doing is making casts of what they thought footprints would look like.  Someone had gone to Colorado over the summer.  In a cave where they were vacationing, they saw dinosaur footprints from the underside.  The rock had eroded and weathered away from below....leaving just the indentations of the footprint.  So they were trying to re-create this kind of thing only with mastodon footprints.  We won't know for a couple of days if it worked and if the mold they built worked. But they tried and it was all their idea.

This is another kind of project. 

Maybe one that doesn't look so spectacular, but one that is full of amazing info.

These are my quieter kids...the ones that really dug deep into their topic.  They wanted to know what other kinds of animals lived as contemporaries of the mastodon we're studying.  So they've done an amazing amount of research to find out.  They chose to create this map and will have small articles that describe each animal they think is significant.  It's a thorough piece of research that took the 4 boys about 4-5 hours to put the map and all the animals together.  The amazing thing about this was that they got together over the weekend....they were so excited they couldn't wait to get back to school.  So they met and worked on drawing out the map at home.