Brief Updates

Two interesting articles came out of eSchool News this week. The first deals with the increasing attention being paid to Green Schools. It's a lengthy article with good examples and tips. The other deals with an attempt to develop more educational video games. It was interesting to see that Global Kids, an online student group (k-12) that was early adopters to the Second Life: Teen Life platform, had helped create one dealing with life in Hiati.

A Quantum Shift

One of the things that we like about inquiry projects is that it allows students to exert more control over the learning process. When proper amounts of time and guidance are provided, students can pause and reflect on what they have learned, what is relevant to the task at hand, and how best to demonstrate their new-found knowledge. Recently, we have come across to parallel approaches that teachers and students might find rewarding. The first came from documentary film-maker Nikos Theodosakis. The Kelowna-based Theodosakis has been offering workshops to teachers and students on the art of documentary film-making, taking the aspiring film-makers through the process of brainstorming and pitching an idea, to gathering and editing the film. For Theodosakis, the reflection that occurs is as important as the finished film itself, and to us, this process mirrors the same one we would love to see happen in science class - students brainstorm and pitch the investigation, research, experiment, and then present their data. Reflecting on the meaning and relevance of the acquried data/film is just as important as the gathering of the information itself.

Putting this process into a wider context is a recent contest launched by online video provider Quantum Shift TV, entitled "Be the Change! Share the Story". Quantum Shift Tv is loosely based around the YouTube format of social networking for video, but concentrates on "the cultural values of community, care, and interconnectedness" offered by citizen journalism. The school contest focuses on documenting a social or environmental project undertaken by the school. Not only does the project hope to encourage students to commit to some form of local action, but contest videos are then uploaded to the Quantum Shift Tv website, where they can be viewed, ranked, commented on, and linked to, by other contest participants in an effort to create a community geared around social and environmental awareness.

Green Schools

Sometime ago we waxed rhapsodic about our desire to see more green buildings in Calgary, particularly those that took advantage of schools as potential green (education) sites. A few weeks ago, we were lucky enough to be invited to Cochrane High School to observe some of the of green steps they have taken over the last few years.

Above is the first solar panel array that the school fund-raised for. The panels have been placed on the roof, and it was mentioned that the biggest limit to the number of panels they could place was not cost, but the quality of the roof.

These kinds of roofs were not built to handle large structural loads, and the placing of solar panels, wind turbines, or event "greening" of the roof, will require renovations be made.

Below is the second array the school purchased the following year (at a much lower cost), along with a small wind turbine.

Does Cochrane High School generate enough power for its own electrical needs? No. Currently the power is sufficient for their large gymnasium scoreboard, a laptop that hosts their website and monitors their power consumption (running continuously), with perhaps a small surplus. The real payoff then is in the interest the school has sparked not just among Cochrane students, but throughout the world, as their website will attest. As more and more schools are being constructed with LEEDS and BOMA standards in mind for greening, Cochrane High functions as a first-generation pioneer in this effort.

Science Conference Reflections

Not exactly a by-the-moment account of last month's Science Teachers' Conference in Edmonton, but the passing of time as allowed for some reflection. The last few posts here at Exploding Beakers has seen us reflect on the change in school cultures - not the plural there as there is a teacher culture and a student culture. We've spent a little bit of bandwidth discussing the disjunction between these two groups. Students, as many commentators, such as Marc Prensky have noted, are moving quickly into an interactive, online culture from a highly stimulating, yet ultimately passive, visual culture (television). Teachers unfortunately, are still straddling the divide between the former knowledge-as-scarce print culture, and a visual one that features knowledge-as-content. Most teachers, especially those featured as regional winners in the Iron Science Competition, are well-attuned to the needs of knowledge-as-content (visual) learners, as were many of the presenters at the Science Teachers' Conference. Unfortunately, these types of learners are a shrinking group, and unfortunately, conference presenters did little to discuss how teachers could better serve the digital demographic.

That learning requires context, is nothing new. In a classroom dominated by a visual culture, knowledge comes as facts embedded within entertaining situations (shows, skits, products), but in the online, interactive, digital environment, where knowledge facts can be recalled artificially on demand, the learning context needs to be an active one with a focus on the application and evaluation of knowledge. Have I recalled the appropriate knowledge? How can I best use this knowledge to complete this task? This is perhaps a difficult conceptual shift to make, but Exploding Beakers is willing to step up and help teachers make it. We will be conference co-organizers for the Calgary 2008 Science Teachers' Conference.

On a more positive note, our favourite conference session came from the teachers at Rundle College, a school for students with learning disabilities, who provided examples and advice on differentiated instruction and assessment in a science classroom. Their assessments were novel in that they respected the learning-style of students, kinestheic learners were encouraged to express their knowledge through physical movement, etc. Was this a perfect for traditional pen and paper midterms and finals? No, as the teachers admitted, it was too early to tell, and definately required far more time management skills. However, student results, as well as confidence and comfort, were quite positive, and the teachers were looking to continue refining their technique.

National Iron Science Teacher Competition (Nov.22)

The crowd started assembling early here at the staging ground for the National Iron Science Teacher competitive. Exploding Beakers had arrived with the morning light to find a group of volunteer and competitors going through last minute preparations for the annual competition as hundreds of science student all eager to cheer on the best, and most innovative Science teachers across Canada.

At exactly 10:00, the auditorium lights dimmed, the music got noticably louder, as lights the overhead exploded in colored lights and sporks. From a cloud of dry ice, as the Discover Channel hosts emerged to kick short the festivities.


Culled from four regional competitions, the teams from Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and the ultimate winners, Unintelligent Design from Manitoba. Highly entertaining, each team provided twelve minute lessons around the theme of "The Body", that could perhaps be said to represent the ideal in a visually-oriented (raised on TV) culture. Many of the teams were able to pack much information into their skits, with one team even adding details about mechanics and levers in their presentation on digestion.



The one thing we would have liked to have seen more of though, was more interaction with the audience along inquiry lines. While most groups organized thier skit around the presentation of a problem, none managed it as a problem to be solved, with the development of a set of criteria for a possible solution, gathering evidence throughout their lesson to be compared against that criteria for evaluation. Only the team from Alberta, with their CSI-inspired presentation came close.



In other related news, Larissa Drozda, from St. Margaret School, was revealed as the Western Canadian winner of the My Science Teacher competition, an online student contest run in conjunction with the Iron Science Teacher festivities.

Social Networking and Teachers

Social Networking may be one of the biggest internet trends in the last few years, but while students flock to it in droves, it's educational potential still remains questionable and in need of investigation. However, we have been hearing reports of school districts being uncomfortable with their teachers signing up for sites such as MySpace or Facebook, as many places (not just Alberta) have legislation and/or professional codes of conduct that seek to regulate the public behaviour of teachers in and out of school. This article, came to us from Eschoolnews.com, via Twitter and MyLearningSpace, and centres around the problem of social networks allowing for the overlapping of a teacher's public and private behaviour.

Dr. Sharon Friesen

A few weeks ago, Dr. Sharon Friesen from the University of Calgary, came to visit the Instructional Services staff and talk about the need for educational reform. Many of Friesen's talking points involved moving the educational system away from the assembly line model that was developed (primarily in the United States) at the turn of the last century. In this model, students are viewed as products that have particular forms of knowledge imprinted (or processed) on them. Quality control measures governing the success of the imprinting, can result in the passing or failing of students. Some of these issues we discussed in an earlier post (The Song Remains the Same), and had even begun exploring in a somewhat abortive wiki-venture, Beware The Octopus. While we enjoyed Dr. Friesen's talk, her's is just one voice in an ever-growing chorus highlighting the need for many multi-faceted changes to our school systems.

Dr. Friesen is also the co-founed of the Galileo Educational Network, an organization that has done some great work in Calgary promoting more inquiry in schools.

Video conferencing

Today we are takig part in a Regional Lead Network workshop on video conferencing and online desktop sharing (great for having students do collaborative work). Several companies such as Polycom, Webex, and Smart offer different formats and platforms. As with our recent visit to Smart HQ with some Dutch teachers, we are very eager to explore the opportunities this software presents, especially when used in conjunction with interactive whiteboards or student laptops.

The Song Remains The Same

(or, The Medium Is Still the Message)

The linked video was passed to us earlier today via Twitter, from MyLearningSpace. It is the type of thing that usually crops up in Education and Technology sessions, pointing to the discrepancy between teaching styles and learning styles in the digital age, we recommend viewing it - but if you are familiar with Prensky's Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants, then you are already thinking along the right path.

However, what captured our attention in this video was the opening scene of an empty university lecture hall, with rows upon rows of seats, along with a caption mentioning how are 21st century students are sitting in 19th century institutions. It instantly reminded us of economic theories talking about how changes in modes of productions can bring about changes in social relations. Shouldn't changes in the storage, production, and transfer of knowledge bring about changes in educational relations?

Many writers on educational issues have discussed how the image of the lone authoritative speaker in front of the classroom suggests that the speaker has knowledge and the students do not. What this also supposes however, is that knowledge or information is scarce. It is the speakers' prior acquisition and mastery of information that grants him or her a privileged position. The explosion in information storage, production, and transfer that started with the printing press, radio, telephone, and computer has made information shockingly abundant. Many educational techniques centre around mastery of information retrieval, a skill that as practiced in the 19th century is no longer relevant. Instead, information retrieval for the 21st century needs to focus more on analyzing and judging value or worth.

Students intuitively understand something is wrong with the educational equation when they ask the perennial question "Why Do We Need To Learn This?" The question is likely to be directed not so much as the content, but the task - "Why do I need to learn how to remember this?" since the possession of a textbook, let alone web-enabled cellphone with online search capabilities makes memorization redundant. Instead, students are looking for a way to engage with the content, to explore its uses and relevance.

Many of the educational reform theories that we encounter deal with enhancing our current teaching technique - how to ask better questions, craft better activities, or assess better. What we need though, is not to refine our technique, but to develop a better one that honours a reality in which students have already mastered simple data retrieval.

Inquiry Schools

A request yesterday for the Inquiry Schools "Water Crossing" video, led us to revisit the Inquiry Schools website, where we discovered several more videos dealing with the Inquiry Process, chiefly one dealing with the topic of energy. Again, what impresses us with the work of Inquiry Schools is how clearly they lay out the Inquiry Process to be used in schools. In our own discussions with teachers we find that, too often, teachers underestimate the amount of time students need to think about the topic initially, and how much open exploration they ought to be allowed to do. Furthermore, these teachers tend to try to constrain the activity to their own class, or to a specific outcome. To us, ideally, Inquiry Projects are cross-curricular, grouped around very broad themes, such as water, energy, transportation, etc., allowing students to find their own area of interest within that. Furthermore, by extending the project across several subject areas, it not only increases the likelihood that students will find an area of interest, but also allows the teacher to increase the instructional time devoted to the early reflection and exploration stages. Rather than trying to shoehorn an introductory episode into a 45 minutes class, piggybacking on another subject class or two enables this precious time to be doubled, or even tripled. Of course, this raises the question of what kind of outcome ought to be expected, as a particular student might be working on the same topic for Social class, as opposed to English class. Any project outcome or rubric therefore needs to be developed in such a manner as it provides for elements common to all involved subjects, but also contains a subset that would respect specific knowledge, skill, or attitude outcomes of individual subjects.

A Friend in the Blogosphere

When the National Science Teachers' Association announced the release of their Lab Out Loud podcast series, we were naturally enough interested. The series comprises 52 episodes and contain extra notes for more in-depth information, with episode one being a look back at the impact of Sputnik on science education and a look forward at the types of skills necessary in the twent-first century.

More pleased however, was our discovery that one of the series' co-creators, Brian Bartel is running his own blog, www.explodingsink.com. Of course, we love the name, but were even more impressed to find that Bartel's Exploding Sink is very similar in intent to our own Exploding Beakers, though much more polished (hey, we're new!). We particularly loved his description of his "margarine lab" where students find percent of water in margarine, via heated composition. The activity serves as a good precursor to percent composition activities later in chemistry. We also appreciated his comparision of online media services, Discovery Education Streaming, and Safari Montage.

Bridgit

At Exploding Beakers we have long been fans of students collaborating with other students in different classrooms and schools. We are particularly impressed this morning with a trans-Atlantic project between a school in NewBrunswick and another in the Netherlands using Bridgit software. Try it out for yourselves!

Being SMART

We are currently spending the day in downtown Calgary at the SMART offices, home to the makers of interactive whiteboards, a rapidly growing classroom technology, as SMART hosts a delegation of teachers from the Netherlands who have partnered up with teachers from the Calgary Catholic School District.

The teachers have spent the last few days visiting schools and sharing thoughts and practices surrounding innovative uses of SMART technologies in the classroom.

Check back soon for some more in-depth information.

Wired Science Updates

Exploding Beakers is pleased to offer Twitter updates for PBS' Wired Science. You can find the updates on our right-hand sidebar. Not only do they give you a different slant on the show, but also link to preview videos. Plus, if you set yourself up an account at Twitter.com, you can sign up to receive your on Wired Science updates on your own webpage or even cellphone!

How To Build A New Science Classroom

A lot of new schools have been built lately, and even more are getting (slowly) renovated. Every so often we are asked for some input on how to make a good (usually meaning safe) science classroom. Such a talk always involves looking issues of best practice, latest technology, as well as fire and building codes. The National Science Teacher Association has recently released their own take on the endeavour, and The NSTA Guide to Planning School Science Facilities is a welcomed perspective.

Global Warming 101

The Global Warming 101 Artic Expedition was one of the initial inspirations for Exploding Beakers. Granted the Global Warming 101 website is much more detailed and comprehensive than a blog like ours, it was their steady updating of information about the Artic Circle that they gathered and posted routinely throughout their May-August trek that we found fascinating. You could come back to the site every couple of days and find something new, whether it was pictures, podcasts, or short interviews with the locals describing how the changing weather patterns were changing traditional living practices.

We encourage you to check out their website and ongoing activities.

LearnAlberta Online Gizmos

Like our students, we love to play, especially online. Sometimes, it's pretty amazing what you'll spend your time doing if it has a certain element of "fun" to it. For example, LearnAlberta has just announced several online interactive demos and assessment applets for Jr. High Science. Each grade level as about two units of study completed so far, each with ten or so "gizmos". Access to the LearnAlberta site is free to Calgary Catholic teachers so check out some of the applets, and use them in class the net time you have a SMARTboard or LCD projector handy.

We like the fact that the online assessment tools offer immediate marking and feedback, so students can tell right away how they're doing.

Science Cafe

Science, like teaching and education, is a cultural activity, but too often we tend not to think of it as such. The common image is one of a scientists, or team of scientists, at work in a lab. But cultural activities come in all shapes and sizes and so we are pleased to announce the upcoming Science Cafe session scheduled for Tuesday, September 25 at the Unicorn pub, downtown on eigthth avenue.

Sponsored by the Telus World of Science and the University of Calgary, Science Cafes will be taking place on the fourth Tuesday of every month. This month features "The Perfect Storm: Animals and Humans" with Dr. David Hart from the Faculty of Medicine and Dr. Maurice Maloney, the chief scientific officer of SemBioSys Genetics, Inc. - for a further schedule and more information, click on the Telus World of Science Link.

Environmental Schools

As much discussion as the talk about greening schools is getting, one of the ideas that rarely gets mentioned, is the idea of the rooftop garden, or "green roof". We first came across the idea in Germany and Italy a decade ago while travelling, and while we thought it was a neat idea, promptly forgot about it until we visited one of the newer schools in southeast Calgary. A large, multi-levelled building, it has a second floor meeting space that overlooks a flat first floor roof and the a small grove of trees on the lawn beyond. It did not tak much imagination to picture a door leading out to a rooftop garden to provide staff with a place to visit in the warm summer months.

Sadly it seems, even the CBC ran a story last week on the slowly growing trend for rooftop gardens, it appears that such a thing will remain years away. If school districts are struggling financially to maintian their existing infrastructure, the added expense of a rooftop garden looks to be an unattainable luxury.

Bring On The Iron Science Teachers!

Last year the Alberta Ingenuity Fund sponsored a province-wide competition for science teachers based on the popular TV cooking game show Iron Chef. Teams of science teachers battled it out in Edmonton's Science Stadium, designing highly creative lesson plans around the theme of colour. Calgary's very own (and good friends of ours) Iron Maidens, rocked the competition, taking home top honours. This year, the contest is going national and Calgary is hosting on of the regional Teach-Offs (if that's what they're calling them!).

Exploding Beakers will be looking to cover all the action, so stay tuned!

Updated links

The archived links section (hosted on the wetpaint site) has been updated with over two dozen links (not including the ones posted here). Click on over to check them out!

A spirit of exploration!

What is the spirit of science class? Matt Cho, also a Father Lacombe grad but now a current Carleton mechanical engineering student, offers this opinion:

"Science, whether it is Chemistry, Biology or Physics, it is fun to learn. The fun comes from the experiences in class. Chemistry is fun because you are able to mix chemicals (under supervision of course) and watch a nice change of color, watch something form or even get a small explosion (though that rarely ever happens).

In biology, which I have never taken myself, is fun as a lot of people say. You have a chance to dissect parts of animals or even whole animals, learn about how things work in your body and be amazed at how much something inside your body can do or maybe even shine a bright light on insects and see how their behaviours change.

Physics, though it is mostly math, may sometimes be fun. You get to see how fast and how far u can shoot something, find out how much fore Superman needs to use to stop a train moving at a certain speed or, if you’re lucky enough, u might get to watch your teacher swing a bucket of water all the way around, then miscalculating how much velocity is needed for the water to stay in the bucket as it is at the top of the swing and gets water dumped all over him or her.

Science is not as boring as many people think, working hard and studying hard and you might just get rewarded with doing some fun labs and experiments."

Teaching About Climate Change

Climate change.

It seems everyone these days has an opinion or an interest in the matter. It's even the question of whether climate change is a debatable subject seems like an object of debate. The questions are not simply, is it happening or not, but do the scientists even agree, and these often detract from the overriding question of what are we to do?

As science teachers, the question "what are we to do" resonates in a different way altogether. The topic of climate change crops up in the K-12 curriculum at different places, and many teachers, wanting to be mindful of the many different public perspectives, are unsure of how far they can go in their teaching of climate change concepts.

Perhaps in recognition of just how much has changed since even the introduction of the new Science 10 curriculum in 2003, the Alberta Government, in conjunction with the Lethbridge Environment Week Committee, has developed Climate Change: Creating Solutions for Our Future to assist teachers in the matter. The document not only provides teachers and students with resources of study, but also creates the groundwork for a consistent dialogue across the province. To download the document, click here.

And they're off!

Thousands of students marched back to class today, and it seems we are not the only ones excited by the start of the new school year. Exploding Beakers asked current University of Calgary student John MacDonald (Father Lacombe, Class of 2006) to reflect back on his high school days:

"One of my favorite moments in high school physics was when my teacher demonstrated what most would call a “hoot” tube. It is basically a tube which you hold overtop of a bunsen burner and a resonant frequency (which corresponds to a wavelength of half the length of the tube) is the result. This experiment peaked my interest into the properties of sound, how it is made and how it propagates through various mediums. This interest later lead to an exploration into the properties of sound absorption in a research paper I wrote in grade twelve. I went to the university in search of information, conducted some laboratory experiments that I came up with myself and came to a solid conclusion about sound absorption in regards to materials used, shape and even how these materials react at various frequencies. It is amazing how a small classroom demonstration can invoke so much interest, that it allowed me to go beyond the scope of the curriculum to discover other aspects of science outside the classroom."

Water - An Inquiry Approach

People often ask us what we mean when we talk about an "inquiry approach" to science learning, and we recently came across this teacher developed video from Australia that does a wonderful job at demonstrating how such a project could be done. That she manages to incorporate some cool technology like Skype to talk to other schools around the world, makes it even cooler.

To download the video, entittled "Water Crossing", click here.

Google Sky

One of the nice things about being here at Exploding Beakers is that when new technology gets released (or even old ones dusted off), it's part of our "job" to play around with it. It's not just kindergarten teachers that subscribe to the "Learn Through Play" philosophy -we do too, and it's something we encourage all science teachers to explore.

So over the next few days we will be playing around with Google Sky, the latest addition to Google Earth, a free download we've been a fan of for some time. Now, users can turn the power Google program into the night sky and use it to view images of interstellar objects. Currently, we've been using Stellarium for our astronomy focused units in grades six, seven, and nine, as well as high school physics.

You can check out both of these programs through the sidebar download link.

Setting up the podcasts

As we are still in the early stages of collecting resources, we have tentatively begun posting links to various science podcasts. In a few weeks we hope to edit this down into something more manageable.

Please let us know about resources you'd like to see here.

Let the Photons Fly!

As we enter the final week of August, teachers and students are preparing themselves for the beginning of a new school, we here at Exploding Beakers can feel the hum and electricty, like ozone at a power plant. We are excited to bring science teachers the latest in news about science education, as well as spotlighting new technology and classroom activities!

So, hello and best wishes to you all!

Welcome!

This site is meant to be an online repository for assorted links and resources for Jr. High and High School Science teachers.