Assignments

Beth Pollard's Portfolio: EDUC 140

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Assignments

Unit Plan:

This unit plan is based off of the standards and content addressed in Holt Science and Technoolgy: Astronotmy text (below) used by MPS schools.

Holt Science and Technology: Middle School Science

Please note: highlighted items refer to materials needed

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Presentations:

As a group we presented a middle school science lesson on Hurricanes. We chose this topic because of it's relevance to current events and its correlation to weather and natural disasters. Our Hurricane lesson consisted of introducing our topic by getting students reflecting upon what a hurricane is and what kind of distruction it can do. We demonstrated this through showing recent news footage of actual hurricanes. We also used video and a powerpoint lecture to define what a hurricane is. Our lecture was informative. Seth used analogies to help the students put this information into a frame of reference that they would understand.

Next, we did an activity that brought together the two main ideas of our lesson. We wanted the students to gain knowledge of hurricanes, but as a current event issue we also wanted them to feel prepared for natural disasters. For our activity, each group represented a city. Each group member was given a role. One member was the mayor, one memeber was the recorder, and one member was the researcher. Each group was given an envelope which gave them clues about what category hurricane was about to strike and a packet which contained important safety information. They had to determine what category hurricane was about to strike and then they had to use their "safety packet" to determine how they would prepare their city for the hurricane.

Group Presentation

Technology in the Classroom:

Bugscope:

"The Bugscope project is an educational outreach program for K-12 classrooms. The project provides a resource to classrooms so that they may remotely operate a scanning electron microscope to image "bugs" at high magnification. The microscope is remotely controlled in real time from a classroom computer over the Internet using a web browser."

In addition to the internet skills and the use of the virtual scanning electron microscope, we also created a powerpoint which summed up our bugscope experience. Bugscope also allowed us to converse with experts online who could answer our questions. The internet is a wonderful technological advance because it is full of answers to questions that we may not know (we just have to know the right places to look!).

Bugscope is a great resource because it is interactive. Students dont' just look up information, they discovery, and think of new questions as they explore.

Bugscope Website

Art in the Classroom:

Bugscope can also be used in various cross cirricular actitivities. Specifically, Bugscope can be used as an art extension. There are lots of creative ways to manipulate the images student will view from the electron scanning microscope. Also, these images provide students with a good opportunity to practice shading and drawing objects to show contrast and shape. The will have to pay attention how light influences the shadowing on these objects. Also, as can be seen in our Bugscope Powerpoint below, bugscope activites provide students with many opportunities to practice their sketching. Students will get to sketch many different views of the insect and can increase how much detail they use as they increase magnification.

Bugscope Powerpoint

Field Trip Presentations:

Technology is a great way to cuilminate an activity. Technology can help students organize all of the data they have collected and information they've learned into a file which demonstrates their acquired knowledge. This is also a good way for students to creatively share thier information with other students.

For example, each group in my class was given a field trip site to investigate. Our goal was to find out about how, as teachers, we could get our class a fieldtrip at that destination and what that would entail. We then compiled our information on a powerpoint that we could share with our classmates.

Field Trip Powerpoint

Online Discussions:

Throughout the semester we were asked to watch various online videos that related a variety of scientific topics. We then were asked to participate in online discussions of these videos with our fellow classmates. In addition, we were also asked to complete assignments which often required us to use our internet skills to do research.

TYPES OF ASSESSMENT: PEER ASSESSMENT (EVALUATION): We used Peer Evaluation as a type of assessment throughout this course. We evaluated each other's group presentations, we also evaluated each other's lunar flip books, and now we are evaluating eachother's portfolios! This is a valuable type of assesment tool for this class because as teachers we will all need to know how to evaluate our peers and take constructive critisicism from them.

TYPES OF ASSESSMENT: LOGS/JOURNALS: There were several times throughout the course where we were assessed using logs or journaling. For a focus activity, we would journal about the readings we were to have read for that class. Also, later in the semester we kept a "Moon Journal" which documented how the moon looked and where it appeared in the sky. This journal was meant to be an assessement of what we were observing/learning about the moon.