Talk about hands on learning, engaged students, and more awesomeness than most could hope to shake a stick at.

This battery powered wand features a mini Van de Graaff generator inside. Push a button on the handle and the static charge built up in the wand causes the included 3D mylar shapes to levitate at your command. Pick it up from Think Geek.

HealthMap integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert.’(HealthMap)

The amount of ‘real-world’ data currently available on the Internet, wrapped in easy to access user friendly interfaces, is creating a boon for science teachers looking to inject greater degrees of relevance into their classrooms.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I’ll bet too, that a teacher doing this unit would overwhelmingly get very positive feedback from the students’ parents, especially any that volunteered to help with it. So would the teacher most likely do the same “unit” again next year? Even if they moved grade levels because they were told what a great job they did and how much the children SEEMED to learn?

I think this is a major problem with most attempts to integrate technology into education. Educators find out about something ‘cool’ and integrate it into their program, then have to scramble to find a way to link it with meaningful assessment. It’s a completely backwards way of thinking, and counterintuitive to creating a meaningful learning environment. I subscribe fully to the ideas presented in ‘Understanding by Design’ where, in a nut shell, they suggest all program development be started at the end (what am I trying to assess and how will I confirm those goals have been reached) and planned toward the beginning (now that I know what proof I require for assessment, what learning activities will provide the students with the knowledge and opportunities to apply this knowledge in meaningful ways).

Technology in education shouldn’t be the end goal, it should be the means to help students gain useful skills and enhance learning and understanding. In my classroom I focus on technology that allows students to share their experimental data (as access to larger data sets can provide stronger evidence for their hypothesis, while also requiring the consideration of other forms of experimental error), tools that let students collect and analyze data in ways not easily replicated with pen and paper, and ways to share with a wider audience, as this ‘authentic’ audience tends to cause students to take greater care in the creation of their final products.

The rub in all this is: at what point in time are students going to be exposed to these tools so that they can use them effectively? Curriculum’s are already bursting at the seams with ‘required content’ making setting aside time to engage students in useful technology a great challenge. What is needed is a school wide commitment to technology integration, with identified subjects where certain skills will be taught and assessed. With this foundation students can build upon their skill set and learn to figure out new technologies on their own — which I feel is one of the fundamental goals.

I concede that this is easier said than done, but I think that is in line with learning. Learning is hard, and learning takes time, effort and commitment. Too often we seek the easy ‘quick-fix’ solutions.

The activity involves using the ruler tool in Google Earth along with the placemark (push pin). Students research the relative distances of the planets from the sun with respect to the relative size of the planets. For instance, if the sun were the size of a blown up garbage bag (1300 mm) then Mercury would be the size of a coffee bean (4.5 mm) at a distance of 54m from the sun. The process continues for all nine* planets (*we can still count poor Pluto in this exercise). Once the relative distances of the planets have been plotted students can take a screen shot of their creation for inclusion in a larger assignment, or they could save their creation as a KML file for inclusion in an online document (be it a blog, or other online sharing medium that can embed a Google Map).

The idea behind this exercise is to help students understand that most of the universe is empty space, and that the distance involved in travelling between planets is vast. It allows students to demonstrate their understanding of our solar system, while applying the skills of measuring, calculation, and an understanding of relative size and distance. I have included a fantastic Excel document that I use to calculate the relative distances and sizes of the planets. It also provides relative speeds of light, thicknesses of planet crusts and more (I do not know the original source of the Excel document).

Carmala Garzione of the University of Rochester in New York State, US, and colleagues say the sudden rise was caused by a huge layer of dense rock dropping off the underside of the crust that forms the mountain chain.

The data showed that the Andes rose slowly for tens of millions of years, but then, between 10 and 6 million years ago, suddenly shot up by between 1.5 and 2.5 kilometres. To the researchers, this is proof for a controversial geological theory called ‘delamination’.

I came across a shareware program last year for the Mac called Atom in a Box that displays atomic orbitals in real-time. It shows electron orbitals as a cloud, and helps students relate that the cloud’s density is determined by the orbital’s probability of containing electrons. It provides a more accurate visual representation of how these clouds exist, and how they interact and orientate around a nucleus. Some of the options in the program are beyond the scope of most high school chemistry classes, but I still find great benefit in showing orbital clouds for a few energy levels studied in class because it helps students understand that these are probability clouds, not finite structures.

Showing quantum state: n=3, l=1, m=0. In the program this would be a rotating fluctuating image.