Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Online Science For 8th Grade Students?
Peterus7 writes "I'm a student teacher in an 8th grade science classroom, and have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online. After realizing that, I've been looking for ways to incorporate internet resources into my teaching, and trying to find cool citizen science projects, activities, and simulations that would be appropriate for a grade school science class, such as galaxyzoo and fold.it. So, I'm asking slashdot for more resources that could help bring science to their lives. Thanks!"
Get them to read Slashdot. I promise their lives will be much more fulfilling. :P
www.KhanAcademy.org FTW!
Do real experiments. The kids will remember that.
I've been out of school for quite a while but have kindled an interest in physics. I find that more and more there are Youtube demonstrations and lectures that are worthwhile. Also labs and hands-on science work is invaluable so I'd check out instructables.com because this not only can provide unique science opportunities, it also helps people in gaining engineering skills. BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Seriously, have them play with applets like this that show them how simple things can behave very differently from an initial guess would suggest. And motivate them with "further up ahead, people are doing awesome things!"
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
http://www.khanacademy.org/ http://makezine.com/ http://www.instructables.com/ http://www.arduino.cc/ http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ And many many more, but those are my favorites.
Teach the kids about 3D printing (see http://reprap.org/ maybe even get one of the cheap printer kits or an UP! Printer if you have budget.
These things let kids unleash a form of creativity and spatial learning that is hard to find anywhere else. No need to actually teach them how to design 3D objects - they'll be scrambling to figure it out for themselves! Keen students will print their own 3D printers. Less enthusiastic ones will download from http://thingiverse.com/ and create "Mash up" objects.
Inevitably one of them will print a penis for shock value, but kids are like that.
I have to ask, does whatever you do for a living come close to making the same positive contribution to society as an average teacher? You say that teachers whom are motivated and genuinely want students to learn are rare. Why do you think people, especially those with degrees in the maths and sciences, choose to teach? For the money?
You may want to look at Scratch programming environment. While Scratch is a programming tool which lets kids make all sorts of stuff (animations, games, etc), there is a large number of kids who build science simulations with it. For example, you can look at this gallery of physics simulations and animations, all of which were created by kids. Most of the projects on the Scratch website have been created by kids and all projects are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, so kids in your class will be able to download the projects, examine how they have been built, and build their own projects upon existing work.
There is also a website for educators who want to use Scratch - you can ask for ideas and suggestions in the forums in that website.
[Disclaimer: I am a graduate student in the research group which develops Scratch]
Check out http://www.explorelearning.com/ for math and science simulations (aka Gizmos) with corresponding lessons.
1. The Today in Science listing of birth and death dates of scientists, and notable events. (For example, today is the anniversary of the publication of Einstein's paper on General Relativity, Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitästheorie.
2. Interactive science simulations from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
3. Science news articles at PhysOrg.com, New Scientist, and Technology Review.
AAVSO?
http://www.aavso.org/
American association of variable star observers?
Kids could observe, but its probably a heck of a lot easier to use the lightcurve generator. Don't tell them about the different kinds of variable stars, let them discover it for themselves.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Computers can be used to detect earthquakes:
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/03/quake_network
You can get a free sensor from the Quake Catcher network (or use a laptop).
http://qcn.ucr.edu/
Another subject that might be interesting: Fossils.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinofossils/Fossilhow.html
Bert
Maybe they like online stuff because they can sit with their screen away from you and play games? Coolest thing you can do online is definitely show them a cool experiment which will usually mean fire or an explosion. It's even cooler to do that stuff in person. The first day of chem class my teacher always takes a dollar bill, soaks it in a water and alcohol solution, and lights in on fire. She would also do a demonstration where she soaked the inside of one of those water cooler containers with the same solution and drop a match in it. That's the kind of stuff that gets kids excited about science.
Short hours, long summer vacation, lack of supervision, great retirement benefits, union benefits, tenure, and discount at Border's books all come to mind. Not to mention that teachers pay increases have outstripped inflation consistently which cannot be said of very many fields. I don't begrudge teachers what they are paid, but they are represented by the largest union in the country, and they are not under compensated as a group and I am tired of hearing that refrain.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
I don't know, but there seem to be quite a few teachers who go about their job the wrong way. They're extremely short tempered and take offense to nearly everything (even given their situation, this is not appropriate), act like a dictator in their own classrooms (such as censoring speech that opposes their own political views even when the students are allowed to speak), treat their students like garbage (constantly yell and throw out anyone who merely questions or corrects them), and fail to make the class even the slightest bit interesting (it doesn't have to be constantly interesting, but the boring way they teach doesn't help in the slightest). Some of them (typically teachers who teach in electives but have never even been trained in the subject before) don't even know what they are talking about. Although, that is more rare. It also doesn't help that students (even ones in high school) are forced to take subjects that they likely won't even need for their profession just because they might use it.
They may like teaching, but many of them (that I've seen) don't appear to be good at it. If you don't have patience, you really, really shouldn't be a teacher.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I probably wouldn't recommend Wikipedia for too young an age group, because their attention span is too short and they need something more interactive. Eighth grade might be about the right time to introduce them to it, but getting them into editing articles is probably something to shoot for more at the 10-12th grade level. Sure, citing "reliable sources" is a pain in the butt when you're a student, but that and writing in general are very useful skills to develop in science. The higher up you go in your career, the more writing you will do, unless you just want to be a lab grunt your whole career,. . .
The American Chemical Society has programs for kids. [ http://goo.gl/805di ]
I meant it as a friendly but semi-serious question about whether the OP was reading the students correctly or not, but it seems that the wry smile it was said with got lost in the translation to text.
That said, your serious question deserves a serious reply: maybe I had an unusually poor experience in the education system, but my general conversations on the subject lead me to believe it was more or less standard. I met a few good teachers, and they make a wonderful contribution to society, I absolutely agree, but they were by no means the majority, nor would they even come out as 'the average'. Incidentally, most of those I've met who were good were the ones who could be making more money elsewhere but chose to remain in education. There were quite a few who'd ended up in teaching basically by default - the classic "if you can't do, teach" brigade. There were even a few genuinely unpleasant human beings who were essentially on a power trip because they got to tell people what to do. The majority, however, were a random assortment of people who'd started well but long since had all drive knocked out of them by mountainous paperwork, unpleasant parents, and ungrateful, poorly behaved little shits in the classroom; I quite understand why they were bad at their jobs, and there was little motivation for them to be anything else, but the fact remains that most teachers I've come across were functioning largely as state-sponsored childcare.
Those who teach well, and even take a pay cut to do so, have my utmost respect. Although it was just a passing comment, I stand by my statement that they are all too rare.
You may be interested in some of the games from the Virtual Immersive Technologies and Arts for Learning Lab (http://vital.cs.ohiou.edu/). Under software, you may find some games that would appeal to your class. I used to be involved in the VITAL Lab and found that the flash games worked best in classrooms. As far as I know, the program is no longer active (ran out of funding), but the resources are still available online for anyone to use.
Short hours
Hahaha... do you really thing a teacher's day end when the last bell rings? Or that many teach summer school just to make ends meet?
Not to mention that teachers pay increases have outstripped inflation consistently
This doesn't seem to apply for any teacher I know.
You'll definitely want http://www.periodicvideos.com/ and their sister site, http://www.sixtysymbols.com/ . Both are first rate.
They may like teaching, but many of them (that I've seen) don't appear to be good at it. If you don't have patience, you really, really shouldn't be a teacher.
I think we need to make teaching more attractive as a career to build a bigger (hopefully better) pool of applicants to pick from. Regardless of what Fox News says, they are underpaid considering the job requirements and stress they deal with.
Wathcing over our planet tutorial at the Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing http://www.ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca/resource/tutor/planet/index_e.php
I'm not sure how directly applicable it is, but The Periodic Table Table at http://theodoregray.com/periodictable is a great science site.
It takes something on the face of it boring (the chemical elements as a simple diagram) and makes it really interesting. If it's not good enough to show to students directly then it should contain plenty of ideas for how to make elements interesting.
A couple of examples: get some tungsten and some magnesium of about equal volume and anyone will notice that one is much, much denser despite both being normal-looking metals. Get some indium and let the students bend thick metal rods with their bare hands.
You mentioned Galazy Zoo, but there's actually a larger effort called Zooniverse, which includes:
... and the other astronomy like stuff.
Besides that, a number of science agencies have various educational resources. From NASA, for 5th to 8th grade:
Other agencies have stuff too, but I don't know where it all is off the top of my head.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Hey! I'm just going through a teacher's program right now, and I've been looking for resources to use with smartboard. First of all, if you don't have a smartboard go here:
http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/
Then try out:
Algodoo (costs about 25 euros): Great physics simulator. I would say it would be useful even for university students. You can, however, adjust the difficulty level. It's good for kinematics, some optics, buoyancy, some fluid dynamics and a few other things. I started off with making a piston pump system.
http://www.algodoo.com/wiki/Home
Crayon physics: Great for intuitively exploring some physics concepts. It costs about 20 bucks. It's similar to above but it's closer to a game. There are a series of challenges that you accomplish (try to move a ball to a star, overcoming a series of obstacles. Learn some physics concepts through osmosis.
http://www.crayonphysics.com/
Celestia: Great freeware for exploring our galaxy (and neighboring galaxies). It implements astronomy knowledge into a space simulator. It allows to you to visit out solar system and beyond. As humanity discovers more, you can update the planet (i.e. with new exoplanets). This one is super cool, a little like Eve Online but IRL. You can also install Star Trek universe updates if you are a trekkie, as well as Star Wars.
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
Ok that's the coolest stuff. There are other things out there but they aren't as impressive. ScaleoftheUniverse is neat, but limited in classroom utility: http://www.scaleoftheuniverse.com/
Off-topic with OP but On-topic with Parent:
So strip collective bargaining rights?
I never understand this class wars business, where the rich pit their non-unionized minions against the unionized employees. Teachers make a liveable income but it's not a life of luxury like the actual upper class would have you believe. To the poor right: stop voting against your interests! If you are upset because you think teachers have it better than you, the solution isn't to bring teachers down, it's to fight for an increase to your own standard of living.
If $50,000 per year is so luxurious, then those making >$250,000 shouldn't mind letting their temporary tax cuts come to an end. Wait, what, you do mind? You mean to say that >$250,000 isn't enough, but $50,000 is? I'm confused.
Why on Earth does the submitter's gender matter?
If you are just going to demonstrations, then I see no reason why kids should not just be watching videos.
There is a huge difference between seeing something live and watching a recording. We are all used to seeing amazing and impossible things on video for entertainment. Doing something real in front of a lecture has a far bigger impact. Plus students get the chance to ask "but what if you did X instead of Y" and see the results (assuming it is safe!).
I skipped classes that thought me only basic math and other things I already mastered, in order to have time to learn to code in C, read Dostoevsky, and work fixing computers and writing simple apps.
Thought? Taught, I suspect... not much spelling and attention to detail in Doestoevsky, then. You must have read it in the original Russian, comrade ...
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Various mechanical and electronic measuring tools abound for use with the PC and for manual use.
They need to learn how to use such tools no matter what sub-discipline they enter. Even if they never use such tools much, they must know they exist and how they work, because they will then know people can do work with those tools on such projects.
Tools to measure and compare distance, time, velocity, weight, PH, temperature, frequency, polarization of light, etc. are all absolutely needed to understand science. The kids love to get there hands on these tools because these are REAL.
Here is a video that my daughter put together on how to make a diffusion cloud chamber. It takes about 10 minutes to make and you need a keyboard air duster. With it you can see the tracks left by background and cosmic radiation. It is a pretty cool way to visually introduce particle physics.
"I.. have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online."
I call bullshit. You're noticing students motivated by non-school things, that happen to be online. Put school online and they will be equally disinterested as before. (Although you get to be that teacher going "Look! I'm hip! I get online! I'm so cool!").
Or, show me an experiment that an online program has better interest-level and/or student outcomes (from the same population of student).
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I've no idea why you have been moderated flamebait, this appears to be a rather insightful question to me.
It's just all so damn sad. I'm falling into a puddle of my own tears. Oh my! I mean, education only makes up around 55% to 65% of state budgets. Why, whatever will those poor destitute people, do? Clearly, they need 100% of all taxes to go to education. Then everything will be perfect and everyone will be well educated and teachers will finally be able to stop living on the street, sleeping in the gutters and living on cans of cat food!
If I had to put up with teenagers all day I'd turn into a cunt too!
Assuming that all kids just want to use computers to play games and use Facebook makes you look like a real dick.
This is so true, they are supervised by backward thinking district supervisors, that deal directly with their parents that didn't finish high school. We need to allow the teachers to actually teach, not just memorization.
NDxTreme Content on the Edge.
It's just all so damn sad. I'm falling into a puddle of my own tears. Oh my! I mean, education only makes up around 55% to 65% of state budgets. Why, whatever will those poor destitute people, do? Clearly, they need 100% of all taxes to go to education. Then everything will be perfect and everyone will be well educated and teachers will finally be able to stop living on the street, sleeping in the gutters and living on cans of cat food!
Citation please.
English is not my native language ... regardless, that wasn't my fault, it was the stupid spell-checker. I guess I need to start using the preview to actually spell check and re-read my posts.
I believe that my English is good enough, considering I'm not a native speaker, and I do not live in an English-speaking country.
How many languages do you speak, and is your second language absolutely flawless all the time?
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
you are welcome to try Bugscope, whose 12th anniversary was yesterday http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/
Cornell University hosts a great biology focused site (ecology and behavior mostly). http://www.birds.cornell.edu/citsci/ One of my favorites is NestCam, but eBird and Great Backyard Bird Count are also great.
uh oh.
did someone hurt your feelings today at school?
it's okay princess, you can tell us.
THL phish sticks
Teachers are in the top half of all earners in almost every state of the union. This is only counting the 9 months they work in their regular contract. If they cannot make ends meet, it means that either half of the US workforce is destitute, or that for some reason teachers are particularly bad at money management. I am not buying either of those. Then add on top of it that the 50% of the work force that makes less than them ALSO has to work 12 months to make less than teachers make in 9, your claim becomes down right insulting. The OP is correct. The whining about teachers being underpaid is a sham.
Underpaid teachers are like teenage boys that don't masterbate. They are extremely rare, but they all seem to be right where the subject is being discussed.
Such as Facebook, twitter, farmville...
One of the best teaching resources, IMHO, is Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers.
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
Highly recommended.
K-12 education does not take up 55% to 65% of the CA state budget, but it does make up almost a third of it.
Of the $127 Million budget, $48 million is earmarked for education and $37.5 million of it is set for K-12.
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html
So, while the OP is wrong in his numbers, and that should be called out, he is not wrong in his general point that the public school system has plenty of money.
Public education is the single largest line item in the states budget.
Yes, I second Concord.org, especially as the put what they develop under free license (the LGPL):
http://www.concord.org/
Not free (except to demo):
http://www.explorelearning.com/
Other random:
http://www.miniclip.com/games/chasm/en/
http://www.missiontolearn.com/2008/03/more-than-50-web-widgets-for-your-learning-mix/
http://simulation.northwestern.edu/
Look for physics simulators; example:
http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
There is a lot of exploration people can do with Google Maps and Google Earth.
We've collected lots of links from homeschooling; I should put them up somewhere.
Stuff by me with links about education in general:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/e59c368c3734a926
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Take a look at the Science of Fringe: http://soinc.org/fringe : "Check this page each week starting September 23 for free downloadable Lesson Plans that mix "Fringe" science with elements of Science Olympiad Division C events like Disease Detectives, Forensics, Sounds of Music, Chem Lab, and Dynamic Planet. Teachers and students in Grades 9-12 can use the plans in the classroom as special projects, tied into curriculum or as Friday brain teasers. Every plan will include learning objectives, online resources, a hands-on activity, discussion suggestions, extensions, episode scenes of relevance, and National Science Standards Alignment. "
Congrats on having a vocational, non-well-rounded education.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
NASA has the best resources, but it can be tough to find them. My favorite, and most applicable for physical science (8th grade in most states), is the solar system simulator from JPL: Eyes on the Solar System But do search the link in parent, and be persistent as NASA's site sucks.
The best way to get kids attention is to start with something that defines intuition, and really focus the discussion on that to begin. Example: we all know that when you cool a substance, it goes from gas to liquid to solid. When you heat it up, it goes from solid to liquid to gas. Look at the noble egg—goes in the pan as a liquid, and as it heats.........wait, ok, well that's a bad example. We all know that when you something turns into a solid, it gets denser, and we know that dense things sink in less dense things, just like ice....wait, another bad example, darnit. On the ice one, some kids will get hooked just because it behaves opposite, other kids will find the consequences of this fact more interesting (that life could not have formed if lakes froze bottom-up, etc).
Each time you want to explain some new principle, the way to set it up is when this new principle is juxtaposed against some other principle the kids already know, but wins out because it's more significant. This is how many discoveries are made in science and why scientists consider the problems intriguing, why should kids be any different? Trying to explain these anomalies is where the aether theory and relativity came from, the photoelectric effect, discovery of the 4 forces (gravity pulls a feather and a hammer the same, how electricty & magnetism are manifestations of the same force, discovery of the weak and strong forces too), superfluidity, the transistor, etc. I believe it's also a good idea to introduce kids to these advanced topics early on, without delving too much at least explain the motivation behind them by telling them the problems they can answer.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Go to sites like nature.com/news , let the students read the latest and most interesting papers or blog entries and discuss them afterwards!
I'd use them to assign off-topic to all the posts concerning teacher pay, benefits, workload and state budgets.
Come on people. This teacher is just trying to do a good job and we have to turn into an on-line teaparty or NEA advocacy forum?
Of the $127 Million budget, $48 million is earmarked for education and $37.5 million of it is set for K-12.
Thanks.
On a side note, numbers on that link are in thousands. ^m^b.
Teachers are also among the most educated, being surpassed primarily by doctors, lawyers, and researchers (who are often themselves professors). The median income for a person with a "Bachelor's degree or more" is 49k and for someone with a masters degree is 52k. If I recall correctly, the average (or median?) salary for WI teachers was 51k, and they are the highest paid teachers in the country (both stats were from the less-than-conservative news orgs). This puts the "best paid" teachers among the average for their education level.
So really, the 50% that makes less than them should have stayed in school and earned a diploma / degree.
Citation here. On a side note, notice how the income drops for people with doctoral degrees (aka professors).
These two sites talk about science errors in movies and TV shows. It's a great way to start a discussion because you're leading in with something fun and familiar, and possibly even something that they've seen and thought "oh no WAY could that work."
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Just rename it 'Defence Against The Dark Arts'.
"That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest-son-of-a-bitch in space! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going until it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years! If you pull the trigger on this you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime!" -- Alliance Sergeant in Mass Effect 2
Education degrees aren't real degrees and they cannot be compared. It is both a joke and a shame in all the other schools on every campus and has been for decades.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Three comments in, and it's a knife fight about the school system between the "Burn The Schools" crowd and the "Teachers and schools are noble places of unicorns and rainbows and they just need another fifty million billion zillion dollars" contingent.
My advice: Eff the Intertoobs. Take them out to see science and engineering in action. Go to a factory. Go someplace something gets built. Take them to some hub of commerce. Take to a stock exchange or a bank. Teach them that the numbers matter, that they have purpose and meaning. Show them the real world works, and not the filthy 1-dimensional world views you get in places like this. Field trips, my boy, field trips.
Look at the noble egg
No, not noble eggs. They don't combine with anything so you can't make a good omelet. :-D
There: use humor! Science humor!
Well, OK, maybe not. :-(
I know you are young and idealistic (and hopefully, a woman), but teaching is a political game, fraught with danger, low pay, and endless politics.
And, I guess, sexism.
Ah, yes, $37.5 MILLION would be quite the bargain for the state of California, wouldn't it? Next time, I'll try to remember to put my pinkie next to my mouth when I misstate a dollar amount by three orders of magnitude.
Education degrees aren't real degrees and they cannot be compared. It is both a joke and a shame in all the other schools on every campus and has been for decades.
I agree with that, but they cost just as much as the "real" degrees do, not to mention that a college degree really isn't much more than a piece of paper that gets you a job these days anyway. Also, even in a "sham" degree, they still make you do shit that takes just as much time as the crap you have to do in any other degree. The difference is merely that "education" as a topic, is bullshit. The fact that it's a joke doesn't necessarily help the people who have to go through it, though.
My mother was a teacher for 30 years until retirement. We did all right, but I would say that the best thing that it gets people is the "regular" middle class lifestyle: house, one economy car for each working parent, and the ability to put three kids through K-12 and then pay for college with heavy financial aid and work study jobs. Mostly comfortable, yes. Well off? No fucking way.
The only thing I would say was better than average was the 3 months of vacation, the very good medical benefits, and that the retirement package doesn't seem to be that bad. Teacher hours, however, are atrocious if you give a crap. You get in early in the morning to get ready, and stay late after they all leave to take care of remaining business for the rest of the day, including conferences, grading, preparing lesson plans, etc. And lets not forget that they have to babysit the little precious darlings of Americans five days a week for eight hours a day.
Mind you, I've never been a big fan of how unions have turned out, and indeed one reason I am somewhat anti-union is from observing the antics of the local teacher's union. Nevertheless, I've never seen where a teacher is paid scads of money for the trouble. Having seen what sort of shit a teacher has to go through, I knew that one of the jobs that I had no interest in was being a teacher. The mere thought of it causes me to cringe. And I like the idea of teaching people, but I never want to go near classrooms of juveniles that would rather be anywhere than in my classroom.
Being a teacher blows. You can only manage it if you like it. Even if you do like it, its not easy. Its preschool without the cuteness, with standardized tests thrown in. I'll forgive them the BS degree for that.
It's not the money that's the problem really. Oh sure, the newbies make shit money, but they eventually do all right.
The problem is the job itself, and its not getting easier.
I am given to understand that garbage men make a pretty decent wage. However, the reason that many don't consider that a field worth aspiring to is because as a job, it fucking sucks. The same thing goes for teaching, only the suckage comes from a different set of causes.
Personally, from my observations, schools would benefit more from hiring more people to help, than they would benefit by paying existing teachers more money. There is no lack of people qualified to do something in a school. What there is a lack of is people hired to do that work. Workloads are high, and classroom sizes are getting bigger. They need more people, but the fact of the matter is that the very unions with their tenure and working to increase existing teacher salaries means that the number of open positions for people who train to be teachers is pretty small. They can't very well hire more people if they have to either give them tenure or worse, not be able to keep them on because otherwise the union will force the district to hand out tenure or to let them go.
Teachers may well be a little underpaid, but what they are mostly is *under supported*.
There are several problems with your argument. First, your claim of 51k average salary being the highest paid teachers in the country is wrong. Not kinda wrong but WAY off. I don't know where you got your data, but it wasn't from your "Citation".
My source is the National Teachers Association. The very first state I looked at was my own state, California. What did I find? STARTING salaries are $41k, and AVERAGE salaries are $68k. That means that many are making over $95k. Very simply, this is not destitution. It isn't even poor. Perticularly when you take into account that this is for 9 months of work. when you factor it into a monthly pay, it becomes the equivelent of a $55k starting salary. This is more than you claim the highest paid teachers in the counter average. The real average for teachers here when factored for the 9 month work year is the equivelent of a $90k a year job. That is AVERAGE for the teachers.
Now that your fake numbers are exposed, we can move on to your attempt to change the subject. We were not discussing whether teacher make as much as others who have the same "education" as them. We were discussing how much they made. Period. You did what all of the people who lie about teacher salaries do when they are called out on the fact that teachers are in the top half of the nations earners. You tried to change the subject away from your claim that they can't make ends meet, and try to change it to an argument about how much other people make in unrelated fields. That is simply dishonest. I am going to call you on it. Why is it you think teachers are incapable of living off of MORE money than half of the population. Unless you can come up with some kind of rational explanation on why this is the case, I can not believe that you are just wrong, but in fact are a liar. And, no, there being some other people that make more than them is NOT a rational explanation.
Finally, your premise that more "education" inherently means more money is simply wrong. Whining that you should make more money because you went to school longer is a dead end. Our colleges have become as much of a joke as our public schools. Those that want to get something out of them can, but the majority of people graduating from them simply put in the time to get their club card.
Games like lunar launder are simple, and illustrate some important principals
An example implementation is here http://lander.dunnbypaul.net/
Some resources in the 'Starter' section of this page: http://www.gigaflop.demon.co.uk/links/education.htm
The University of Illinois Department of Physics has a good site for their outreach program, the Physics Van: http://van.physics.illinois.edu/ It's good if kids want to ask questions of professors and students in the department, or read previous answers to questions. It's also good if you or the students want to learn about demonstrations, some of which can be done at home.
Currently, I pay the bills as a graduate student by going to elementary schools to do physics demonstrations on behalf of my department (not at U of I). I don't know where you teach, but there is probably an outreach group nearby (at a University, National Lab, or even a corporation that employs research scientists) that can come to your school. I realize you weren't asking about live demonstrations, and I certainly think you're doing the right thing looking for good, engaging online activities, but I still think this bears mentioning.
Another thought is that because clear and accurate representation of results is so important in science, you might consider doing an activity that involves a computer visualization of some kind of measurement taken by the students. You could even have them publish it on the web. It wouldn't need to be anything super-fancy, just something to encourage creativity and careful thinking about what the results mean and what's important about them.
Good Luck!
Get them to find the most interesting things you can do with ammonia and iodine.
You should know the rest.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
So, presumably, if teachers have it so good, you have given up your job and become one then!
America, Home of the Brave.
I've taught a course called Technology in Science Education, and my premise was that technology for the sake of technology is the wrong way to go - a sentiment I hear echoed here pretty frequently. HOWEVER, there's a reason we use technology - it gives us abilities that we don't commonly have. And this addresses that other common critique when someone wants a technology for education - it's not just a "Cool, see how this is on a computer now?" thing, or a replacement for hands-on experimentation, but rather a way to leverage more mileage vs a 1950's-style experiment. This is the way technology is used in scientific research, and a great way of thinking to instill in the kids at an early age.) I don't say, "This light bulb works great, but lets use a LASER INSTEAD! Muhahaha!" Ok, maybe I do, but that's jut me...) So, I came up with three major categories of technology that are likely to be useful in SciEd. (Not the only three, probably, and not every time - but if a tech fits in one of these bins it's worth a second look.)
1. 'Superpowers' - a technology gives us the ability to see something we couldn't otherwise see - slowing down the trajectory of a ball to measure it's x-y position in lots of time steps; using a spectrometer to separate colors (or focus on a small slice of wavelength) and find concentrations; authentic planetary models, with the ability to change the pace of time (and obviously the scale). Basically (and whimsically) think of any superhero/villain, and ask what science they could have done. Then find a technology that gives you that ability.
2. Data aggregation and representation - when the basic data (numeric or otherwise) are pulled together in one place that allows interaction, subtle connections can pop out (especially with good classroom scaffolding). My immediate go-to examples are a touch outside of science, but are at least illustrative. Simulate 1000 spins of a roulette wheel in Excel (or your favorite programming language or open source package... gotta CYA this statement since this is Slashdot...), connect it to the Martingale strategy, and show that statistics owns the day with gambling.
3. Administrative tools - self-explanatory, these help with administration of the class. Often scoffed at by people who have never taught, and aren't trying to tease out the nuance of 'what went wrong' on that exam, or when it only 'looks' like that got it. Things like choice-analysis from a multiple choice quiz for spotting persistent misconceptions, only-the-fly 'clicker' quizzes, etc.
My one strong caveat (I did say it was worth a SECOND look - which happens here) - once you identify a technology that might be of interest, the question should always be, "Is this worth it (time, money, pedagogy, etc.), and can I do the same thing low-tech?" This is where you cut out the "It's just like real life, but ONLINE!" instinct that sometimes pops up.
Even if the same thing could be done low-tech, it may still be worth adapting into high-tech - but make sure your reasons are good. Perhaps your school has a tiny science budget and the experiment would otherwise go unperformed, or if you want a quick aside or demo and can't spare the time in the lesson for the physical setup of the demo. In these cases, tech may still be the answer.
My two cents anyway!
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
http://www.cyberlearningstem.org/ is the website for a recent conference on STEM cyberlearning tools (CyTSE). A lot of really great presenters from academia and industry came together to show their latest and greatest efforts. You can find a lot of good links on the site back to the original projects at http://live.cyberlearningstem.org/
My cousin is a teacher and she does teach summer school to make ends meet, spends extra hours at school with endless meetings, spends hours at home grading papers, preparing lessons etc. It isn't all beer and skittles my friend.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Have the check out Julius Sumner Miller.
Save money on your cell phone bill: Republic Wireless
have your students look into distributed computing, and pick a project, then run work units and compete against each other, or join each class as a team and have thoes teams compete. BOINC comes to mind. I would get them to learn a little about distributed computation, pick some task that would take one student a day to complete, then have them break it down into N-1 student chunks of work, and have the last student act as the co-ordinator, moving data back and forth and compiling the complete and final answer. https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/ LLNL has a nice introduction. you could also show how different living organisms like bees and ants work together. An example of a large project that would take one student a long time would be to build a model of the International Space Station. Building each single peice wouldn't take a student that long, and then they can put all the peices together in class, and now you have some more artwork to hang in the class room too.
A great place to visit is www.shodor.org/interactivate for online tools that are keyed to the states' standards. These exercises contain information for the instructors and the students. Interactivate has been awarded many awards for their quality. We even use them at the university level.
D. E. (Steve) Stevenson, Ph.D. Emeritus Associate Professor,School of Computing,Clemson University.
The Learning and Education group for EOL is working on a set of tools and applications designed to make EOL more accessible and useful for education audiences. EOL itself is an amazing (and growing) international effort to bring together biodiversity information from around the world on one website, with a webpage for every described species on Earth. EOL is open and free with all content licensed under the Creative Commons. Check out http://educaiton.eol.org/ for more info on how students and teachers can use EOL... There is a "build your own fieldguide" tool that is just about ready for public release. Some sample guides are currently available to show you the idea.
Twenda Learning: Educational Apps that Engage.
Short hours, long summer vacation, lack of supervision, great retirement benefits, union benefits, tenure, and discount at Border's books all come to mind. Not to mention that teachers pay increases have outstripped inflation consistently which cannot be said of very many fields. I don't begrudge teachers what they are paid, but they are represented by the largest union in the country, and they are not under compensated as a group and I am tired of hearing that refrain.
Short hours and long vacations are a bit misleading, all the teachers I've ever known have done a lot extra on top of the "office hours" of 9 to 3 or whatever.
Lack of supervision certainly doesn't apply here in the UK, there is a lot of testing, monitoring and so on. You get a reasonable pension here (at the moment) and there is indeed a good union, but tenure doesn't apply to teachers here.
Overall, teachers are not particularly badly paid by public sector standards. A newly qualified teacher straight out of college starts at about £21K, similar to a trainee fireman, policeman or social worker.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
After 175 comments and relatively very few online pointers (given the 20+ years of the use of ICT in Education), my guess is that the OP is somehow disappointed. Lemme provide some comforting thoughts:
1. There are literally thousands of online resource indexes related to the OP's question. There's not lack of online information and resources, but a painful and blinding abundance of it. Hence, the problem is how to distill all these resources into something useful (especially for a novice like a student teacher).
2. There is a lot of material online, but very few well-documented and research-based instructional and learning models pertaining to the use of computers in education. In the age of computers, smartphones and tablets, there's much more available information about what to learn with them and how to use them, but very few pointers to why an experiment should be done on computers instead in the real world.
3. The theories of learning and perception are shifting themselves, because the new generations grow up with computers and use them as a new, independent sensory input for an emerging new IT-related human sense. Just watch some of the videos featuring the use of XO laptops in third-world countries (or even toddlers' use of computers on youtube) and you'll realize that these kids do develop an additional sense, a kind of a "third eye". I don't think educational theory will ever catch with that evolutionary trend.
4. "Science" is a blanket term that tends to encompass a wild variety of subject matters. Unfortunately, there are no recipes in teaching "science". You cannot blindly transfer the same teaching/learning models and strategies from e.g. classical mechanics to optics and then to cell biology. This is one of the reasons teaching is and IMHO will remain partly a science, partly a craft and partly an art.
Therefore, dear OP, a list of "online resources" won't help much. Double-blinded studies will not teach us much. We need first to understand the emerging child-computer ecology (which is tantamount to approaching an alien language) and then slowly, step by step, largely by trial and error, devise new strategies able to exploit the ever-developing man-machine interaction into the 21st century. However, the technologies themselves change too fast for a carefully planned research. Therefore, the utilitarian argument will always prevail: we must use computers in schools, although we don't really understand why, because the world the kids will grow up into depends on them and because they'll probably be required as a professional background skill. Many Computer Science Departments already got the message and have turned their curricula into apps user training (Office, Autocad, Matlab etc).
To sum up, the first question to be addressed is "what do you want your children to learn and why". When you've figured that out, there are hundreds of options regarding "how" and "what means, including software". Will it work? To my knowledge, there are no guarantees.
If you are interested, we could set up an online discourse environment for your class to work on the materials and interact with myself and my students about this work. We've designed the materials so that they align with the Ontario curriculum, which is very similar to most U.S. curricula, and each component includes a design challenge based on real-world problems for the children to work on.
My name is Dr. Donald N. Philip, and I can be reached at don.philip@utoronto.ca
Thank you for sharing your story.
I used to work for an organization whose entire goal is to bring math and science into the classroom via computational means. Check out several of their projects:
Interactivate
CSERD
Petascale
MASTER
antipaucity
Let's do a little math, shall we? How much do you think educators should make? For argument, let's go with $40k on average. Now, how many students on average does the teacher have? Let's say 30. So each student's family would have to come up with 40,000/30= $1,333.33 each year for their teacher. How much do you pay in state taxes? For argument let's go with 5% of your family income, so maybe $6000.
So if you had two kids, and you were paying your fair share for your kids' education, about 44% of your taxes would theoretically be going to pay just their teachers. That's not to mention the cost of the schools, buses, administration, textbooks, benefits, etc. So I don't think 55 to 65% of the state budget being spent on education is unreasonable.
Perhaps instead of cutting taxes for the rich, this country should get serious about paying for what they expect. I would gladly pay more state taxes to keep schools, parks, and libraries open. All of these things are on the chopping block in my neck of the woods.
By the way, that's billions, not millions. Numbers are reported in thousands.
Even then, do you really think $37.5B is "plenty of money" to educate 9.3 million school age kids? Seriously? That's roughly $4000 per kid. Think about how much people pay for daycare and college. Probably half to two thirds of that would be for teacher's salaries alone. That leaves the rest for the other costs of educating people: administration, buses, books, maintenance, etc.
Let's look at another line item. They have $9B for corrections. There are roughly 170,000 inmates in California. That comes to about $53,000 per year per inmate. More than ten times the cost of educating a child. Where do you think you get more bang for your buck?
I co-founded Wikipedia partner site http://en.wikibooks.org/ for exactly this type of use. There are some high school science books already on there which you can reference, or even better, have your students edit and expand themselves. This can be done with a whole class or just for a group of top students or for extra credit. I believe this is the best way to capitalize on the online aspect, not just passively reading someone else's material, but actively participating in creating and editing the learning texts.
Yes, the poster above pointed out my mistake on the magnitude.
Yes. $37.5B IS "plenty of money" to educate 9.3 million school age kids. Seriously. Trying to put it into a per kid value shows that you have no either don't understand the math, or are trying to deceive. The cost of running a business like a school does not scale linearly. Presumably colleges have far greater resources as they should, and a smaller enrollment which, because educating groups does not scale linearly WOULD be more expensive per student. And daycare as a 1-6:1 child to adult ratio whereas a public school has a 15-30:1 child to adult ratio. Only a moron would think that the costs for daycare wouldn't be at least an order of magnitude more expensive for daycare.
Of course, your attempt at trying to compare the states youths with convicted criminals is both insulting to the youth, and dishonest. Maybe if people like you didn't think that schools and prisons were the same thing, 37.5B wouldn't seem like such a small number to you. Do you really think that it wouldn't cost 10 times as much to forcibly hold adults who have demonstrated that they are willing to break the law in cells against their will than it does to educate a child?
Let's look at the cost of my child's daycare. The legal ratio is 18:1; the actual ratio is about 11:1. The "teacher" does not likely have a college degree. She probably makes $14/hr. My share of her income is probably around $3,300. So a lot of what I pay is for overhead. I get that. I also understand economies of scale. But the quality of education is also supposed to be better at elementary school compared to daycare.
The elementary school in my neighborhood has a ratio of 17:1. The teachers all have bachelor's degrees, and many have a master's. The average salary is somewhere around $47k. That's $2,764 per child just for the teacher's salary. I can certainly see administrative costs, benefits, supplies, etc. costing over $1,250 per child. I simply don't see $4,000 per child as an exorbitant amount.
Comparing corrections budgets to education budgets is not the same as comparing youth to criminals. And yes, I can certainly see how it would cost 10x as much as teaching kids. My point is that there's a problem when people are ranting about cutting teacher's pay while non-government corrections contractors are getting lucrative contracts.
Citing Bachlors and Masters degrees for teachers are a red herring. Just as a Masters degree is a waste for a McDonalds Fry cook, is is also a waste for a K-12 teacher. While a Bachlors Degree MIGHT be able to be rationalized as useful for grades 11 and 12, it is also a waste for any grade lower. Their bad choices on how to spend their youth and money neither entitle them to earn more, nor does it indicate whether enough money is being spent on education. It is a non-issue, and claiming that it is an issue shows a lack of willingness to have a real discussion on the subject.
I don't know what state you live in. In some of the poorer states, $47k average is certainly possible, but in those states, $47k is not a bad salary. In higher cost states like CA, starting pay is over $40k, and the average is almost $70K. That puts many teachers earning over $90k by the time they are hitting retirement. While that isn't Bill Gates rich, it is a pretty fine salary for someone that only works 9 months a year, and has less than an 8 hour day.
As for your comparison between youth and convicted criminals, your backpedaling indicates that you are fully aware that it hand no baring on the conversation.
Very simply, for the job that teachers are tasked with, they are paid a pretty good salary. The education system as a whole is also pretty well funded. The constant claims of poverty are simply a lie.
Hey guys, thanks for your comments, I haven't had time to read them all, but will attempt to start sifting through them over the weekend. A few things I wanted to clarify: I appreciate the plethora of worksheets, activities, etc. available online. That's very useful to a beginning teacher, since I don't have a very large library to choose from, and these things can save me the effort of trying to come up with one on my own. However, what I was looking for (and mind you, I haven't had time to sift through everything) is cool stuff that can really help them get involved in science that they can do online. If I'm teaching them a course on galaxies, and I break out galaxy zoo for a day, I think that would have a pretty cool impact. Plus, it's something that they can do on their own time if they want to. I also feel that kids should learn how to use the internet for more than facebook and youtube, but that's a whole new subject. Also, someone called BS on me saying kids were into online stuff, saying that they wouldn't be into school related online stuff. To that, I reply that they were doing a demo of standardized testing software, and the class was silent, eyes glued to the screens. It might have been the novelty of having smartbooks in the classroom, but I felt that if I could perhaps offer some more online resources and additions to their standard fare of worksheets and labs, I could give them a more thorough education. Thank you for everyone for posting. Some of the posts I've clicked on have been very insightful, and I deeply appreciate the time and effort you have put into them. If you have any suggestions, email me or stop by my blog. Thanks.
Costs the same in dollars but not in hours spent. Not even close.
My parents are both teachers. Neither has an education degree.
Mom owned and ran a 'Harvard Prep' preschool, degree in Child Psych. Dad is a Professor so can't really be called a teacher. Oblig: Prof. Farnsworth 'of course I can't teach, I'm a professor!'
Finances in our house were not great, especially when dad was a post-doc and mom was just a pre-school teacher. They got substantially better.
I'm kind of thankful they didn't get the long summer vacations we kids did. Summer was much more fun with them out of our hair.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You typically receive a breakdown pie-chart of how the taxes are spent each year, by your state (usually around January or February). I haven't looked at every state, but the two that I've lived in most recently have shown education expenses between around 55% to 60% despite the states having frequent loud "we don't spend enough of the money on education and we can't give the students quality schooling, because of it!" contingent. Namely, Oregon and Colorado.
I only did minimal digging around, so I didn't grab it straight from the source, but here's a chart sourced from the state of Oregon that shows 54% spent on education, 17% spent on prisons, 24% spent on human services. Colorado is at about 49% on education. Washington looks to be about 40%. Other states that I've looked at seem to show education as the biggest chunk of expenses and often accounting for around half of all expenses.
In addition, the federal government also budgets for education to supplement this.
Oregon Tax Dollars: Where do they come from and where do they go?
Colorado Tax Expenses Breakdown
Washington Tax Expense Breakdown
As a result, I have always had a difficult time taking complaints of "we don't have enough money!" seriously, when they often consume more tax resources than every other expense, combined.
I said 55% to 65%. Currently, Oregon spends 54% on education. Colorado spends about 50% on education. I'm not sure what there is to "call me out" on. California may spend less of their overall budget on education, but there are other states. These are the two I've received end of year fiscal reports in the mail on and which are definitely very loud "pay us more, we don't have enough money to educate children!" states.
A quick skim of a few other states (Wisconsin, etc) seems to show around 30% tends to be the minimum range of funding - still more than any other expenditure on most of their books. By a lot.
I don't care about the justifications. The point is, plenty of money is being spent on education and the more we spend, the less we get. The idea that "if we only spend 90% of taxes on education, we'll finally get it right!" is bullshit. Rather than demanding more funding, how about getting your shit together so you can do more with your resources?
Also, I don't have any children, so I'm already paying for your fair share. (And no, don't give me the "but you already got your education so you're just returning the favor derf derf derf" stuff as I left school a month into my first year of highschool to get a GED and made my own way in the tech industry where I've been very fortunate with no thanks to the shitty education system I wasted so many years of my life in).
I have a better idea. Don't breed until you can afford your child's expenses and let everyone else keep their money. Especially since every single educational system in this country has proven that they are both corrupt and irresponsible. Nobody would mind half of all state taxes going to education produced great results. But you can't provide shit results and then hold a knife to the tax-payer's throat saying "well, just give us *more* and we'll totally do it right next time!".
Since you obviously think that teaching is a no-education-required profession, there's not really any point in trying to have this discussion. You are among the misinformed throngs that think teachers just sit around babysitting all day. Good teachers put in hundreds of hours outside of class time preparing lessons, calling parents, taking continuing education courses, decorating their classrooms, and grading homework. These things take time and training. The notion that teachers work 9 months a year for less than 8 hrs a day is only true for shitty teachers.
I don't think you will find any teachers that claim to be in poverty. In fact, I find more people claiming that teachers claim poverty than actual teachers claiming to be in poverty. But they are not excessively paid. In my area, the average teacher makes about 10% over the median individual income.
The conversation is (or morphed into being) about percentage of a state budget for teachers and whether or not its unreasonable. So bringing up corrections is certainly germane. I guess I could have talked about H&HS rather than corrections, but it's harder to get good data on how many people that department serves.
Do you have an online source for that 55%? If so, it would be a very good talking point. I say call you out, as I have not seen any data to show any states spending that much. That doesn't mean it isn't possible. If you are exaggerating, those that support the same position should call you out, as it would undermine the point. If you are accurate, then a source would be very good for keeping the statement from looking like an exaggeration, and driving the point home.
As for the claim that no one is saying teachers are in poverty, you show that you are among the missinformed throngs that plug there ears to the world. Just a little ways up on this thread you will find that frosty_tsm said:
Hahaha... do you really thing a teacher's day end when the last bell rings? Or that many teach summer school just to make ends meet?
His kinds of comments are down right common.
I'm not saying kids like everything on the internet. They don't. In fact, they don't do much with 99.9% of the internet, because they have zero exposure to it. They don't know how to do research on scientific things online, they don't know about the opportunities to help with ongoing research, and they don't have any real sense of internet literacy outside of youtube and facebook. My goal with this post was to get a good sense of what was out there that could help bring science to them in multiple ways- A textbook based lecture with a cool science simulation I found online is likely far more effective than a textbook lecture alone.