Here’s a short list of activities you can do to celebrate National Earth Science Week (Oct 11-17) with your students:

http://www.earthsciweek.org/forteachers/classroomactivities.html

Activities are listed by grade level and content standards. This list is provided by the American Geological Institute, AGI.

Want more? Try the NSDL Science Literacy Maps to find NSDL resources using science benchmarks around earth science ideas at different grade levels.

Students, teachers, all walks of life are encouraged to contribute to the National Gallery of Writing to celebrate the National Day on Writing, October 20, 2009. Need some help in getting ideas? How about some suggested topics and activities from the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears Cyberzine on ways to integrate science and literacy into your teaching.

As many teachers have experienced, deciding to use more technology-related tools and materials in your teaching can be overwhelming. Where do I start? How can I find a way to use technology that is more rooted in what I’m trying to accomplish with my students? How do I let go of the reins and introduce technology in a way that I can moderate my students’ progress?

In the journal article, Instructional Planning Activity Types as Vehicles for Curriculum-Based TPACK Development , Judi Harris & Mark Hofer, professors in the School of Education at William and Mary in Virginia, state that a teacher’s ability to integrate educational technology is greatly influenced by three factors: teacher content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and technological knowledge. If you imagine a Vinn diagram where each of these factors overlap with one another, this area of expertise can be referred to as TPACK.

While each of these factors independently can be areas for professional development, the confluence of all three of these areas results in a special type of training and skill base that greatly plays into how a teacher goes about deciding how to use technology in their teaching.

So great, now that you’ve got your TPACK hat on, what next? Thankfully, Harris and Hofer have provided some guidelines to help out. They suggest that the best way to go about integrating technology is not to start with the technology first, but last after learning goals and teaching approaches have been defined. They offer a step-by-step process that gives teachers a context to determine when to use something like a blog, a wiki, a podcast or other means of technology in a meaningful and purposeful way:

1. Making practical pedagogical decisions about the nature of the learning experience

2. Selecting and sequencing appropriate activity types to combine to form the learning experience

3. Selecting formative and summative assessment strategies that will reveal what and how well students are learning

4. Selecting tools and resources that will best help students to benefit from the learning experience being planned

To help in this selection process, Harris and Hofer have defined different activity types that help categorize what type of learning and learning approaches are to be accomplished for a given topic. This helps to break down the process and give teachers a systemized way at looking at aspects of content, teaching approaches, and the use of technology in a more coherent manner. What’s even more interesting is how you can move students from gathering information to higher order activities of synthesis and interpretation by combining a series of these activity types and how technology can create the means of getting to these higher order processes in the form of an iMovie, or a podcast, recorded interview or other forms of content created and reviewed by students.

You can read the full article, including a list of activity types and suggested teaching and technology approaches on a wiki the authors have created. There are also activity types specific to science , math, K-6 literacy, and other subject areas.

If you’re working on the daunting task of revising your curriculum to better meet standards or have a need to hone in on selecting teaching materials that better align to learning goals, you might want to attend a workshop on the AAAS Project 2061 Atlas of Science Literacy. These maps show science concepts in a progression of learning from early childhood to secondary education. They provide a valuable tool in your toolbox when it comes to integrating teaching materials, learning goals, learning theory, benchmarks, and standards into a more cohesive practice. Click here for more information.

Roll your sleeves up and attend one of these sessions:

* Durham, NC: September 14-16, 2009

* Washington, DC: October 19-21, 2009

* Cambridge, MA: January 25-27, 2010

* Denver, CO: February 3-5, 2010

* Columbia, MO: October 6-8, 2010

Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears is an online professional development magazine–or rather cyberzine–that serves as a great resource with lots of ideas for teaching. You can find tips on teaching a unit on fossils (a student favorite). In the Science and Literacy Department of the April 2008 issue, author Jessica Fries-Gaither provides tips on teaching fossils with the help of online teaching materials:

“An effective unit on fossils involves developing concepts in a logical and sequential manner. Students should first understand what a fossil is, the differences between fossils and other natural objects, and that not all plants and animals become fossilized. Next, students learn about the various types of fossils and model the process of fossilization. Finally, students can model the excavation process and use fossils to make inferences about past environments.”

Go directly to this article to find out more.

Join us for this free, online web seminar from the NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar Series for the 2009-2010 school year!

Title: Chemistry Comes Alive IV: Oxidation/ Reduction

Date: Oct 15, 2009

Time: 6:30p.m.-8:00p.m. Eastern Time

Presenters: John Moore, Lynn Diener, Shannon Stahl

Registration is free!

Oxidation/reduction is one of the most difficult concepts taught in an introductory chemistry classroom. Students often struggle with the fact that oxidation must be accompanied by reduction, what is oxidized, and which is the oxidizing agent. Often they must see the material several times before it “clicks”. This seminar will expose participants to online resources to help you teach students these and other challenging aspects of oxidation/reduction. The seminar will explore videos, netorials, the Periodic Table Live! and an online textbook to help you teach these concepts. We will also focus on current research in the field of oxidation and reduction and how you could bring this research into your classroom. To learn more, go to the NSTA Learning Center to find out about our NSDL series of seminars. Register today!

If you’ve ever used interactives or simulations in your teaching, you know that these kind of materials can help illustrate complex concepts or ideas more visually and with more opportunities for student interaction.

With so much in the news about swine flu, using Shodor’s Disease Model, can teach your students about the spread of disease while also addressing a current issue in the news. Shodor has a collection of models, simulations and other materials related to computational science. These materials are nicely set up to teach cross-disciplinary lessons.

The Disease Model interactive represents the spread of a disease in a population. It is meant to illustrate the various factors that can affect how quickly and how far a disease can spread. People that are colored green are healthy, ones that are infected are red, and ones that are immune are represented in blue. Doctors (in white of course!) come along to vaccinate people in the model, and changing the status of those they are in contact. The model is very interesting to watch and offers opportunities for writing and reflection to describe what is happening while it is running.

Changing various factors in the model also changes the outcomes of spread, just as they do in real life and this model tries to represent some of those outcomes and what we can learn by running numerous trials.

When you use this interactive, you can set up various parameters that are excellent for guided inquiry exercises. You could ask questions based on running several trials of the model. Here are a few from the Instructor materials that go with the model:

How does population density affect the spread of a disease?

Activity: Set the initial population to 2000 people. Run the model a few times. Record the number of people who are recovered and the number of people who died when the infection stops spreading.

Why is an epidemic especially dangerous in a crowded city like New York?

Activity: Try again with about 1500, 1000, and 500 people. Record the number of people who are recovered and the number of people who died when the infection stops spreading. Density as a factor. A disease can spread more quickly the denser a population is.

How does a quarantine help to stop the spread of an infection?

When is it appropriate to enforce a quarantine?

Try it out, or comment on other ways you could use this model in your teaching!

If you’re just starting to dip your toes into the greater “wild world web” for using digital resources in your elementary classroom, a slight change in the way you approach a lesson can give you a better sense of how to manage and incorporate more online resources in your teaching.

Take for example a math lesson. Having students play an online game that involves addition is a fun and motivating way for them to practice their skills. You could start with some practice drills on paper, reminding students that they will put their practice to the test by going onto the computer to play a couple of addition games.

To control and manage computer time for your students, having a tool that points them to an online activity directly might be useful. Instructional Architect is a free tool that allows you to create links to materials outside of your school’s server and make pages that specify where students need to go and why. You can use existing materials teachers have used or create your own. For our example of math, try this simple lesson that uses two links, both of which provide adding practice, one as a competition, and one as a baseball game.

Once you’ve tried it, you can think about how using online materials can enhance what you’re doing. You might also want to brainstorm with your colleagues on ways to use these materials for more self-directed approaches or self-assessment activities.

Our series of summer webinars on chemistry, physics and multimedia resources is now available through our recorded archives. These three hour-long sessions demonstrate a host of resources, ideas and tips to spice up your teaching. Take a look to plan for your school year!

Multimedia Resources: Teachers Domain

Chemistry: ChemEdDL

Physics: The Physics Front

Starting this fall, our series of free online teacher professional development continues! Watch for these seminars featuring experts from the NSDL community for the 2009-2010 school year: Chemistry Comes Alive IV: Oxidation and Reduction, Timely Teachings: Seasons and the Cycles of Night and Day, along with seminars from PBS favorites WGBH Teachers’ Domain and Dragonfly TV.