Science Education Idea Exchange

ClassDojo  is free data app. You create classes that allow you to track positive and negative behaviors, along with randomly selecting students and keeping attendance. There are inspirational videos and ways to upload photos of your class to share with parents. When you select a positive behavior, your smart device/computer gives off a happy chime. When you select a negative behavior, you hear a deflating noise. You can create reports of behaviors and attendance over any period of time. This is how I use it: Attendance: I keep track of who is in my class and who is not. There are often times that my students are present at school, but not in class. This allows me to keep track of students who are present for the lesson. "Random Monster": This is what I call the random name generator. I use it to cold call my students so that everyone is accountable and no one feels picked on. It has made a huge difference in participation in my bell ringers. (Plus, then I don't have...

I discovered Plickers  after an observation of a classroom last year. I have used clickers in my classroom, but have issues with batteries and can only retrieve reports after we are done reviewing. Plickers uses a picture that can be scanned by a smart device. Depending on how the student orients their paper, they can have up to four different choices. Plickers is a free resource that you can create classes, question banks, and reports that show student percentages as well as question percentages. I use it for review. It offers real time data so you can see how your students are doing as you pose the question. I am all about free resources!

I saw on the Teaching Channel with Amy Spies. She uses three drawer rubber maids for her students to hold classroom supplies and has a basket on top. Her students are seated in pods with the drawers in the middle. What a time saver! Since I have a middle school science classroom, I had to modify her design to work for me. I repurposed salad containers and placed die cuts on each of them that correspond to tables in my room. The buckets contain highlighters, scissors, glue, tape, red pens, and a calculator. (At the beginning of the year, it was enough supplies for groups of four.) My students know to just grab the bucket when they need them and leave them tidy for the next class period.  It was an easy thing to implement. Just a little training at the beginning of the school year and no extra cost since I was already purchasing the salad for my tortoise.

We wanted to make the human body more interactive and more STEM based. I think all of us have seen the lung bottle made out of a water bottle, balloon, and straw, right? Rather than presenting the model to the students and have them identify the parts, I decided to challenge my students to building a working lung model. The problem they were provided was to inflate a balloon inside of a bottle without touching the balloon directly. We spent a little time planning after they had read about the respiratory system. I gave them two days for construction. The first day, many students were trying to simply place a balloon in the bottle, attached to a straw. They thought it would be as simple as blowing in the straw. Boy, were they surprised! I encouraged my students to think about how their bodies work, hoping they would think of the diaphragm. The picture below were the top contenders from each class. It was so cool to see their creativity and to help them conceptualize the respiratory ...

Another great free resource is the Teaching Channel . I used it when I was looking for ideas on teaching middle schoolers integers. On the website, I found a video and lesson plan for a scenario a teacher set up for her students to make it more tangible. They email weekly with videos on various topics, like common core.

Teachers Pay Teachers is an addicting website! You can sign up for free and there are several free and cheap resources. The website sends a weekly email with 10 free downloads and usually two are science related. One thing I have learned is that to be a good teacher I do not have to reinvent the wheel. (Not to mention the power of sharing ideas leads to greater things for the greater good.) I wish I had the talent of the contributors.

This year, I wanted to offer learning as it's own reward. I had originally created a binder of science-y extensions that students would look at when they're done. I learned quickly that it wasn't very effective. I was reading an article on differentiation and it suggested making extensions/anchor activities a requirement. I had an idea! I would create a tic-tac-toe board with options on activities related to our current topic. In my grade book, I have a "0" weight category for practice assignments, like checkpoints. My students did a great job with our first go! For our physics unit, I created the board below. I wanted to incorporate different types of activities like review games, vocabulary posters, links, and quick labs. To set one up for your classroom, choose activities for your tic-tac-toe board.  Create a tic-tac-toe board with titles, descriptions, a spot for their score, and your signature. Every student should receive one when you explain y...