1) Purpose/Goals: This project will be for high school students to investigate their phenomenon of choice and record their findings in a digital format.
2) Rationale & Summary of Project: One important skill of scientists is to be able to make your own data and share it with others. As such, students in class will be set in groups where they investigate some phenomenon of science of choice and share their findings including data of their results, video of their experiment, and a writeup on a blog.
3) Audience: My audience is high school physics students. They'll probably already be familiar with many technological tools already, and at the end they'll give a presentation about what they looked into.
4) Overview of Your Instructional Plan and Your Learning Objective/s: Students should be able to pursue their own avenue of interest and take quantative analysis to come to a conclusion about what their results mean. By using an online wikispace, students can share their results with other students and that uploaded project will also be used to assess that they were able to form a hypothesis, test it, and come to a conclusion about the results.
5) Technological Tool/s & Rationale: Students will use video recorder technology, any video or audio editors they feel are useful, and a wikispace that I'll have set up for them to upload their projects.
6) Learning Theories/Principles: Using the Next Generation Science Standards, this project will support cross cutting concepts of 1. Patterns and 2. Cause and Effect. In the 21st Century Skills, this will assess Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Collaborating, Communicating, and Technology Literacy.
7) Timeline: This would be a project which takes place over roughly a month. In the first week students would give a suggestion about what they would like to investigate. I'll consult with them about the appropriateness of their project and help them come up with alternate ideas giving them a week to conduct their preliminary experiments which they'll use and analyze to make a hypothesis about the patterns they've seen. Following that I'll give a bit of a buffer so I can look over their results and give feedback while students look at each other's posts, suggesting critical tests which might disprove the hypothesis or put it to a real test. In the final week, students will choose one suggested test or make their own and make a prediction about what will happen according to their formed hypothesis. Finally after actually performing the experiment which they should record and post online, they'll decide if their hypothesis actually held up or if they disproved their original hypothesis.
List of 21st Century Skills can be found here: https://k12.thoughtfullearning.com/FAQ/what-are-21st-century-skills
NGSS Crosscutting Concepts: http://ngss.nsta.org/CrosscuttingConceptsFull.aspx
NGSS Core Standards may apply depending on project chosen.
Hi Chad,
ReplyDeleteI think this is a good, basic plan. It must be hard to incorporate multimedia into a science class, so simple methods are probably best. Will you provide any input for them along the way using their Wiki space? If so, what tools will you use for that and what kind of information will you inject?
I'll definitely be providing input along the way to help students keep on target. As for the tools to use... I'm not really sure yet! You'll have to follow my project through the semester to see where I end up.
DeleteChad--I wonder if you had a hard time developing a proposal as I did. I am also a science teacher. I think before this year, this project would have been much easier, but the NGSS throws a bit of a wrench into the plan since all the topics are revolving around a guiding phenomena issue. Those not in science probably wouldn't understand the hurdles of the curriculum.
ReplyDeleteWhat I like about your proposal is the exploration of student driven phenomena. This essentially the heart of the NGSS and allows the student to explain this information in the MMP format. It will be interesting to see how this pans out as I may want to use some of your ideas to develop my own assignments.
Good luck with your project.
And good luck to you too! Those NGSS things really make things hard. Plus science just seems like the least applicable subject to this course aside from maybe math.
DeleteHI Chad!
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting idea! I like how it is a student driven project. For a class last year, I conducted a research project, assessed the data, and wrote a paper. Even with a great teacher supporting us every step of the way, it was hard! One of my biggest challenges was organizing my data to draw conclusions. I found that working with a partner or group helped me to pull out trends that I might have missed otherwise. Students will benefit with the communal aspect and support from peers. Can't wait to hear more about it!
Hi Chad,
ReplyDeleteYou have a solid plan in place. I wonder if your students will struggle to come up with topics? In my experience, I have found that even adult learners struggle to identify their own topics of interest. However, with your wisdom and technology ability, I am confident that you will help your students overcome any hurdles that they might encounter. They could share their quantitative results in a program called, Numbers. Better yet, they could create a Gimp or Flimora video to project their findings. It would be nice to see if they could synchronize tech tools.
I am really glad that you were able to digest the info in our course so well, Chad. Best of luck with your project. I will follow up.