Free Science and Math Online Simulators

This week I have encouraged my 8th grade physical science students to play around with the Density and Buoyancy simulators through this website:

http://phet.colorado.edu/

Students have been engaged and the simulators have helped students ask some great questions. Most of the simulators also have worksheets uploaded by other teachers, so your students can take part in more of a guided inquiry assignment.

Classroom of the Future

In August, Andrea Lawless (CCA) told me that a friend of hers named Kerri Ranney was working for an architecture firm in Texas on a project called the "Classroom of the Future".  When I contacted Kerri, she told me about how they had been working with a class of students who had been designing the classroom.  They were going to enter an international competition at a conference in San Antonio and wanted to present to people from our district as the "customers".  We set up a video conference for this afternoon; I got teachers, administrators, and students from all over the district to participate.  We just finished, and I had some thoughts.

First, the students on both ends did a great job.  I was impressed with how their students had based their classroom design on current educational theory.  The classroom they designed was more like an office workspace than an old-school classroom.  There were stations for different types of work; mobile furniture allowed for students to work in groups of any size; plentiful whiteboard space made brainstorming possible anywhere; and the whole thing was designed for student-centered learning.  Our students asked some insightful and intelligent questions; one thing I noticed, though, was that many of their questions were based on a "stand-and-deliver" model of teaching:  Where would the teacher stand?  Would all the noise be distracting?  I found it interesting, and realized that an important part of the work I want to do as an instructional leader involves educating not only teachers but also students about the benefits of alternative instructional models.

Second, it was a useful exercise for me to set up a video conference.  The TV commercials where the teacher says, "OK, now we're going to talk to our friends in Japan" and then pushes a button and the class appears...  well, TV commercials may not always tell the truth.  We had a few technical difficulties, but part of that was due to the particular circumstances on the other end (working from a convention hall), and part of it was due to the novelty of the experience on our end.  There are a lot of tools for video conferencing and/or webinars (WebEx, GoToMeeting, AnyMeeting, Cisco Telepresence, Google+ Hangouts, Skype), and they all have positives and negatives.  As we make video conferencing more routine in our district, we'll settle on the most useful tool and have that set up on district computers, making the technical issues moot.  (For what it's worth, AnyMeeting seems to be the most promising program I've seen so far.)

I'd really like to encourage more of this kind of activity in classrooms throughout the district.  The more our students can interact with students around the country and around the globe, the more prepared they are for life in the 21st century.

New Diigo Lists for Math, Science, Social Science

I've added three subject-specific lists on Diigo, to share resources that I find that are relevant only to certain teachers.

• Math:  www.diigo.com/list/kfairchild/math
• Science:  www.diigo.com/list/kfairchild/science
• Social Science:  www.diigo.com/list/kfairchild/social-science

I'll add to these lists throughout the year; I'll continue to add to the general EdTech list (www.diigo.com/list/kfairchild/ed_tech); and I'll add other discipline-specific lists in the near future.

Why EdTech?

I came across a couple of interesting links this weekend.  The first is a short video advocating for ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in schools.  The video comes from Norway, but I think has a good deal of relevance for students and teachers in any country.



The second is a short article from Education News: Secondary Schools Must Embrace Technology - and Soon.  This article quotes Leanna Kelley writing that using technology in secondary schools allows students to work more often at higher levels of thinking.

I was asked via Twitter what would be the most important point to emphasize in a conference presentation on flipped learning.  After thinking about it, I replied that it was the fact that flipping instruction allows more time for higher-order thinking skills in the classroom.  The goal is for students to work in the upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy.  Flipping, or ICT, or problem-based-learning are tools for teachers to use to help students get to that goal.

If This, Then That

Computers were supposed to make our lives easier, back in the day.  We all know the combination of truth and fiction that idea contains, but here is a website that might actually make your online life a little easier. IFTTT (If This, Then That) allows you to set up rules for all kinds of events, and then the website takes some action when that event happens.

For example, you might want to get a text message if the weather forecast includes rain (IF the weather forecast is rain, THEN send me a text).  There might be people whose Facebook posts you don't want to miss (IF Melissa posts on Facebook, THEN send it to me by email).  You might want to automatically re-tweet something from a particular group (IF "#edtech" appears in a tweet, THEN re-tweet it to my followers).  Maybe you want to automatically save articles from Google Reader (IF I star an article in Reader, THEN send it to my Evernote account).

There are a lot more possibilities, and this is where you might want to involve your students.  Having them come up with IF... THEN statements is a great way to (a) get them thinking about organizing themselves in the digital world and (b) get them started thinking about logical decision making, either for programming, or math, or science, or an essay that develops an argument.

IFTTT has potential to help you organize yourself and could benefit your students as well.

Why Aren't You Using Diigo?

Diigo (www.diigo.com) is a bookmark-sharing service.  It has plugins for all major browsers, so at its simplest, you can use it to keep your bookmarks accessible from multiple computers, tablets, and smartphones.  Beyond that, though, it has a social component.  I can follow other people and see what they are bookmarking, and they can do likewise for me.  (You can set saved links to be private, if you want.) You can also organize your bookmarks into lists and get a public link for a list, which you can then share by email or on a blog for anyone to see, regardless of whether or not they have a Diigo account.  Basic accounts are free; there are paid plans starting at $20/year; but educators get a free Education account that allows you to set up groups for students so you can share web resources with them.

As part of my new position, I have been reading and research a lot about 21st-century skills, promising instructional methods, Web 2.0 tools, and other education technology topics.  I save the web pages and articles I find most useful to Diigo.  You can sign up for Diigo and follow me if you want to see those articles as I post them.  If you don't want to sign up or follow me, you can always see my EdTech list by going to www.diigo.com/list/kfairchild/ed_tech.  To get more information about Diigo itself, go to help.diigo.com/home.

Flipping

You've probably heard about "flipped learning" or "flipping the classroom".  In a typical classroom, a teacher gives direction instruction (perhaps a lecture) in class, and students do independent practice as homework.  The simplest description of a flipped classroom is one in which the direction instruction happens at home (perhaps by students watching a video) and the guided and independent practice happens in the classroom, where the teacher can provide help and support.  This is the basic outline presented in the first half of Flip Your Classroom, by Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams.  (See my quick review of this book here.)

There are a lot of advantages to simple flipping.  For one, if you provide your direct instruction on video, students can pause, rewind, or rewatch at their discretion.  They can watch when they are ready to learn, which (as we know) is not always during classtime.  For another, students who struggle with independent practice have the teacher there to help them out.

Beyond those immediate benefits, however, there are some deeper reasons to flip your classroom.  Crystal Kirch (flippingwithkirch.blogspot.com) is a math teacher in Santa Ana who presented at a Flipped Learning workshop that I attended.  She gave a presentation that outlined what truly gets flipped:

• Responsibility for learning, flipped from teacher to student;
• Face-to-face time, flipped from teacher-centered to student-centered;
• Focus of class time, flipped from lower-order to higher-order thinking skills.

If you're interested in having students take responsibility for their own learning, and in spending more time on higher-order thinking skills during your class time, find out more about flipping instruction.  Here's how:

• flippedclassroom.org - A professional network of educators who are at various stages of implementing flipped learning.
• flippedlearning.org - Resources, including blogs and podcasts, about flipping.
• #flipclass on Twitter - An active discussion among some of the leading flippers.
• The Many Faces of the Flipped Classroom - YouTube video from ISTE 2012.