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!"
www.KhanAcademy.org FTW!
Do real experiments. The kids will remember that.
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.
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
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.
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/
Slashdot is the intelligentsia.
Reddit is the hivemind.
4chan is the dark underbelly of the internet. When archangels travel within 4chan, they do it as a group, with heavy air support.
Tl; dr: 4chan is virtual hell
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.
"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
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!
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.
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.
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.