Online Science Demos

Part of my current position is integrating technology into the pre-existing Science curriculum. The extra challenge is justifying it to the teachers who have taught (exceedingly well) for years without computers. I think that University of Colorado's Physics site is a great example of a worthy investment, time-wise for the students. My favorite part is that is simulates lots of concepts, and lets you play with variables to really get a good idea of how things work.

You can employ this site in a few ways:

• show it on an LCD projector with the whole class, while discussing/asking for hypotheses as to what will happen next
• You can let the kids loose on computers in groups to play around with it.
• There are also lesson plans for certain demos, if you want to use those as well.

Please feel free to look at the lesson plan I made for the 4th grade Electricity and Magnetism unit.

Google Docs/Forms for quizzes

I love the idea of using Google Docs to have students type up reports, book answers, or whatever, but I still hae to figure out how to get around getting 200 accounts for my elementary school kids, whose parents might not want them to have email. Until then, I realized I can still use Google Forms!

Google Forms allows you to create a questionaire, survey or quiz and let your kids fill it out simply by accessing a web page. Of course, the URL is nasty but I just shortened it with TinyURL with the name of the quiz, it's much easier that way.

Sample Form (please fill out!)

After (or while) the students are filling out the forms, you can get a spreadsheet of results WITH graphs of how they answered! Check out the responses to my Sample Form.

You can make questions mandatory or optional, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the spreadsheet, and you can sort the spreadsheet by last name (I made two seperate questions to facilitate this, "first name" and "last name", and "teacher's name" since I am in 8 different classrooms).

Finally, my favorite part - you can select a column to code for right or wrong answers. I asked it to highlight everything in red that said "no", "east" or "west" (to answer, what are magnetic poles called), and whatever else signaled a wrong answer. Or you can code green when you ask an essay question that signals a correct answer for using key vocabulary (pole, attract, iron for magnet concepts). It makes everything so easy to grade!

How does using Google Forms help you in your classes? Any questions or tips?

Classroom Blog

I obviously have been lagging in my posts for this blog, but I wanted to share what I have been spending time on in class. I made a blog specifically for my class and have been encouraging my kids to use it and comment on it. We actually spent some time playing some science games, and then I asked each to comment on the game with a tip, a question, or a statement about the game. It's pretty exciting, and it gets the kids used to computers and teaches them to be responsible about computers and the internet. Plus they love using the laptops!

In my 5th grade classes, I am working on teaching them Power Point by assigning them a few words, and having them use PP as flash cards. They will then teach the words to their classmates. We'll see how it goes, I may post some up here!

How do you integrate teaching technology into your curriculum?