Project Wet

Workshops are critical to teachers to gather resources, new ideas, different teaching approaches and many more reasons. I am in the Professional Development School which is helping to prepare me to be a good teacher by pairing me with a current professional teacher who can mentor me in the process. Since much of this teaching world is new to me I had no idea that workshops cost money. I thought they were work not something one would choose to do.

Once the shock of payment for workshops wore off I found out that many are quite reasonable and extremely helpful.

I attended an 8 hour long workshop in Fort Collins, CO called Project Wet last weekend which was surprisingly important for all science teachers to be apart of. It taught not only about the current water situation in the world, but provided a lesson plan book with hundreds of pages of activities spelled out for any grade level teacher. The teachers were dynamic and the fellow teachers and student teachers phenomenal!

I plan on attending the second portion of the workshop, Project Wild, which will focus on ecology as well as teaching techniques to science teachers across the state in October.

Asked community: Balancing Chemical Equations

Resources are key to every teacher, especially for those teaching the ever-changing field of science.

Where do we go and who do we ask when we need resources?

Generally, I like to check my Google reader to see the newsbreaking stories or Google search to find a resource. Is there a different way? I tried to see if asking a professional network, such as Classroom 2.0, would be a better source for asking a question. My question was about how to teach students the steps to balance a chemical equation. I used to ways to answer the question: search and the community network.

I found that the exact same ideas that teachers gave me on Classroom 2.0 forum that I began were available on Google search engine.

In conclusion, I have seen that a search engine is much more accessible and speedy to find resources. People will never cease to be a source of knowledge, but I will need to find other professionals in my content area to trouble shoot with rather than an online community that takes longer to respond and who are not necessarily any more capable than myself.

Societies and Associations for technology saavy teachers

AACE, ISTE, ITEA, and AECT are all places for teachers as associations to fall back on for help and resources. I would like to talk about just two today, and possibly the others later.

I found ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) to be the most useful as a teacher. It had helpful sites for the use of Web 2.0 as well as curriculum ideas! The webpage was usable and a great future resource for K-12 teachers of all content areas.

ITEA (International Technology Education Association) was also helpful. It's viewpoint is focused on technology-literacy through hands-on technology largely in science and math- perfect for us science teachers! From grants and conferences to journals and resources, ITEA offers many outlets for the technology saavy teacher (or the beginner who needs a helping hand).

AACE and AECT are also wonderful technology education associations focused on bringing technology to all students in a constructive way. These websites focused more on how to bring various medias to the classroom. This is something I want to explor more, including how to create and use successfully my own videos in the chemistry labs and lectures. Where could we go with videos? Could we tape each lab and lecture for absent students one year and be able to hand them out every year after? Could we videotape experiments gone well vs. horribly to show safety lessons at the beginning of the school year? What else are you science teachers thinking?

Copyright Laws

Copyright can be a huge issue for science teachers when wanting to use resources such as a cool YouTube video on exploding gummy worms or the spreading of diseases. So what are the rules of copyright? They vary on intensity, which adds more to our work as we must find out each source's rules on copyright. In general, though, copyright says that the author has exclusive rights to use or change the art or literature to any degree. For teachers, we have a slightly different rule of thumb: Fair Use.

Fair use lets educators use copyrighted materials as long as it meets some standards. Siting sources is still of course important, but the hoops to go through to use these materials are still lengthy and time consuming for the busy teacher. What to do? The answer seems to be Creative Commons...