A Look at Science eTextbooks - Engaging and Inspiring Students

One of the biggest challenges of teaching with iPads, for me at least, is churning through what often seems like an endless sea of quality apps.  There has been an explosion of resources made available for parents and educators alike.  Trying to choose which app to use can be one of the biggest challenges for those educators thinking of using the iPads with students for the first time.  (In fact, this is why I advocate choosing two or three apps and using them almost exclusively in the beginning).  Often overlooked when searching for resources and ideas are some of the most visually stunning eTextbooks and eBooks.  I thought it was about time these resources got a look (and yes, I do know I have added another level of resources to the mix).  Here are some of my favourite eTextbooks for teaching and learning Science.

Senses and Natural History: Origins are two examples of the visually stunning, interactive and informative eTextbooks that are sure to revolutionize the type of textbooks educators will soon choose to use.  Published by Imaxina, an educational organization from Spain, and written by science specialist and educators, both Senses and Natural History: Origins are suitable for students ages 12 and older.  The texts use interactive media and amazing imagery.  My favourite image was the enlarged pop-up picture of the octopus tentacles.  The texts are engaging, contain the information students need and are visually complex.  The Science textbooks I have been using with my Grade 6 and 7 students for the past decade are wordy and difficult to use in any way other then…. read for information, answer the comprehension questions and fill out the worksheets.  Science should be exciting and these eTextbooks present the material in an interesting and informative way.  I was engaged and I am pretty sure they will engage my students.  I can see using them in any Science classroom and believe them to be a valuable resource for educators

Another amazing series of eBooks are the Life on Earth series of 7 eBooks by E. O. Wilson, a noted Biologist and University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard.  Developed in partnership with Apple, they are free and can be used in conjunction with a free iTunes U course.  The course and books cover several topics.

I had the privilege of hearing E O. Wilson speak about these books in July and was amazed and inspired by the amount of detail and work that went into them.  Added to the interactive media are some pretty detailed scientific animations that so clearly demonstrate the scientific concepts that even I can understand them.  The visuals are stunning, the text is written by one of the leading experts in the field of Biology and…it is a free resource that is far superior to any I have seen in my classroom. While the text is more suitable for older students (and is designed to provide the full high school Biology curriculum), the images will engage younger students and provide a starting point for discussion, questioning and scientific inquiry, exploration and discovery. 

Thinking Like a Scientist:  Students as Mobile Researchers by Julie Hearn (a Maple Ridge, BC Grade 6/7 Teacher and Apple Distinguished Educator) is not an eTextbook for students but rather a guide for teachers on how-to introduce inquiry into the curriculum.  These ideas can be adapted for all grade levels and give examples of ways to use iPads to capture and share the learning experience.  This eBook is free, as are many others, and well worth the read.  Check out the Apple Bookstore for other great examples.

Apps Are Not Always the Answer - Learning Environments & Inquiry

An ideal learning environment is one where students are engaged and excited by what they are doing.  Where learning is focused on the process rather than the product.  Where exploration and inquiry guides instruction.  Where critical thinking skills are developed, learning is self-directed and problem-solving is practiced.  One of the greatest challenges facing educational leaders is dissemination.  How do you support teachers who are reluctant or unsure about these changes to their pedagogy?  Through modeling and mentorship of course. 

Rather than choosing the tools and resources and then developing lessons and activities, it is important to first determine what inquiry opportunities can be created and how the iPads, apps and other technology tools can support the inquiry.  The SAMR model was developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura as a way of evaluating the impact technology lessons and technology resources have on the learning environment and student engagement.  Here is a two minute video which explains the SAMR Model.  SAMR is an acronym for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition and refers to the level of change technology has on the teaching and learning environment.



A Padagogy Wheel that helps you choose apps for each task can be found here and there are many other resources found on the web.

Keeping in mind that those moments from school that I best remembered were ones where I was actively engaged in inquiry, projects and learning with my peers, I try to choose stations and activities that would be both appealing to students and support learning through a student-centered model.   As much as possible, I also wanted to introduce students, teachers and parents to the process of inquiry and promote inquiry-based learning as a pedagogical focus.  I have found introducing this process to the school all at once can help reluctant teachers and parents understand the power of these learning experiences for students.

Planning a school wide event can seem a daunting challenge but breaking the process into chunks and recruiting help can make the entire process easier.  A lead-in time of at least a month is highly recommended.  Weeks before the event you should:

 •  Form a committee or planning team.  These events should be collaborative in nature and include the input of staff, administration and students.  Don’t underestimate the support a group of student leaders can offer, both during the planning and on the day itself.  Have regular meetings to keep everyone up-to-date on where progress has or hasn’t been made.  Report out the results regularly. 

•  Create a to-do list of everything that needs to be done and assign the tasks to volunteers.  Confirm where the funding will come from for any items that need to be purchased.

•  Decide on the types of activities you want to offer and create a list.  These activities should be student-centered, hands-on and open-ended.  There are many resources available to support those looking for ideas and some helpful hints included in this chapter to support choosing activities. 

•  Communicate your intent to staff and set a date.  Continue to keep staff informed and share out a plan for the day itself (include items such as a schedule, physical layout, sign-up sheet, last minute information and answers to some of the FAQs).

•   Invite parents and the extended school community.  By creating a wider base of participants you lend legitimacy to what you are doing.  Consider extending the event into the evening to attract parents who normally would be unable to attend.  Involve local businesses and reach out to them for donations (money, items for estimation, equipment). 

•  The day before should be spent in ensuring all materials are in the school, setting up the stations and confirming the volunteer schedules for the following day.  I recommend having each staff member sign up for stations throughout the day to ensure students are actively engaged and that no station is overwhelmed with participants.

A great source for finding and creating inquiry questions can be found at Smarter Science.  The resource pages include specific inquiry activities, a planning template for creating inquiry activities and a question matrix that helps generate quality inquiry questions.  Many of these resources can be used in multiple subject areas.

Link #1  My Curated App Collections

This is the access page to my six curated app collections.
They include:
• Math Apps for Parents
• Essential Apps for Teachers
• Literacy Apps for Parents
• Measurement Apps to Use in Math & Science
• Apps to Promote Creativity
• Apps to Promote Mathematical Thinking

Link #2  Smarter Science Question Grid

Smarter Science is dedicated to promoting inquiry in Science.  This matrix can be used to generate and refine inquiry questions in any subject area.

Link #3  Dan Meyer’s Three-Act Math Tasks

An excellent resource with many math lessons/ideas all centered around using inquiry in the classroom.

Link #4  Using QR Codes to Differentiate Instruction

Some excellent ideas from edutopia  written by Monica Burns, a NYC Educator and Apple Distinguished Educator.

My One Best Thing - ADE North American Institute July 2013 

My One Best Thing - ADE North American Institute July 2013 

I am still trying to catch up with all the postings and preparation sent out by Apple and the ADEs attending the North American Institute in July.

So far ADES have had the opportunity to:

•  submit a 1 minute video of a student or colleague talking about their most meaningful ah-ha   moments
•  sign up for a 1 in 3 session - Apple will give you three minutes to talk about your practice while they video tape you
•  experience an ADE Institute iTunes course
•  sign up for a photo walk of Austin on Sunday the 14th prior to the start of the institute (signed up and ready to go)

AND....

submit a posting on your One Best Thing.

This One Best Thing is proving to be a real challenge for me for a couple of reasons.  Unlike the 1-in-3 session, this part of the process isn't voluntary and I have to be honest with myself - I am not really that good at self-promotion (I fear being seen as a braggart).  How do I take credit for things that are often collaborative?  The truth is that I do drive my own practice and often expect the rest of the school to accommodate me, but the real joy for me is working with a motivated team.  How do I narrow down what I am doing?  The things I do best have become intertwined into a single entity - it has been a long time since I looked at the various chunks and tried to rate them.

I am a generalist - a classroom teacher who has to be an expert in all subject areas.
As such, the challenges that face me, like many other teachers,  are many:  teaching curriculum, engaging students, working with at-risk boys, supporting my colleagues’ professional development, advocating for change at the school and district level, writing grant applications, begging and borrowing what resources I can to support my students, organizing whole school community events, creating and publishing lesson ideas and helping to support (hopefully) a change in the direction of the school. 


This past fall, I started work in a school where, in the past, not much attention has been paid to using technology to support learning.  There were no real resources.  Not much buy-in from staff, students and parents.  No real interest in inquiry.  But this is changing and there has been a significant shift in the direction the school has taken.  Think the influx of 70 iPads in the past few months for a start.  I am so excited for this change and so grateful that I have a chance to be a part of such a shift.


I have been struggling to narrow down my One Best Thing.  I think I have strengths (and weaknesses) in many areas - so how to decide.  Part of the challenge in deciding is the knowledge that this One Best Thing will be the basis of my project when I am in Austin.  I don't think I want to do project work on integrating technology into my classroom practice.  Although I think I am good at it, I have been doing this for years and I want to explore other topics I am not so experienced with. 


Currently, my passions are supporting other teachers as they try to change their practice AND creating a school-wide environment to support student learning.  So I will go with that.  My One Best Thing for the summer institute is.....supporting teacher engagement and change at the school level.  .....although I want to explore assessment options and expanding the learning community as well.

Essential Apps for Teachers

Here is a list of what I consider to be essential apps for teachers. 

....and check back regularly for updates

On My Way to Austin - The First Steps - ADE North American Institute July 2013 

On My Way to Austin -  The First Steps - ADE North American Institute 

July 2013 

In February of 2008 I was welcomed into the Apple Distinguished Educator Family.  Off to Quebec I went and had what was certainly the best Professional Development Experience of my life. Sessions with a Pulitzer Prize Winning photographer, a photo hunt in a blizzard, my first bobsled run and a chance to meet and work with some amazing Canadian educators.....yes Shelagh, Kevin, Colin, Dean and Mott, I mean you.

Fast forward to July 2013 and I am headed for Austin, Texas for a North American ADE Institute.  ADEs from Canada, the United States and Mexico will be there.  Many people ask what it means to be an ADE and the explanation I give is always simplistic and lacking detail since you kind of have to be there.  So, I am going to try to document the process and share the excitement.  (Mom, this is for you.)

First step was the invitation to apply.  Attendance at the Institute is not a given.  For me, the application process included updating my monthly journals (where I document my activities as an authour, advocate and ambassador), creating a video of what is happening with my students and filling out an online application.  The application was due by January 1st and then I waited until the end of February to find out who the new ADEs Class of 2013 were and whether I was accepted to go - and I was!!!

The next step was filling out the forms for hotel and ground transportation, indicate what potential workshops I was interested in attending or facilitating, complete an ethics compliance form and get approved by my District Superintendent. 

Then the planning emails started to arrive.  A teaser video from Maxx Judd, Worldwide ADE Program Manager for Apple sets out the shape of the week.  There will be a session with another Pulitzer Prize Winning photographer, share-out sessions with noted experts in the field, chances to create content with support from an amazing group of experts in the field and opportunities to network with some amazing people.  An online collaborative space was set up to facilitate planning and discussion.  The ADEs have been encouraged to post and contribute to various forums and project pages.  We have also been invited to sign up to contribute and share our story of transformational learning.  And since this is Apple, the organizers have created a iTunes U course to guide us through our week.

My goal for the next few weeks?  I have been out of school for only two days and I am behind in my Basecamp postings and contributions - I need to catch up (and I will).  ADE enthusiasm is always contagious.

Gizmos - Science and Math Simulations for Your Classroom

Gizmos - Science and Math Simulations for Your Classroom

Gizmos is an online website (created by Explore Learning) that has an extensive collection of math and science simulations that cover the required curriculum from Grade 3 and up.  

The simulations can be searched for by curriculum and grade level, academic standard and textbook.  They are interactive and engaging and do a great job of providing students with an opportunity to carry out scientific inquiry and test their understanding of concepts.  There are supporting lesson materials, student guides, vocabulary and online quizzes educators can use to test student understanding.   In addition, Explore Learning provides video tutorials for professional development and support for use in classrooms. 

In Food Chain students can run a simulation of an ecosystem over time and explore the effect of removing different levels from the food chain. The predator - prey relationship is explained.  Students can even examine opportunities for recovery from catastrophic damage to the food chain.  In Building Pangaea, students can shift continents and explore and test Alfred Wegener's theory that a supercontinent once existed.  pH Analysis was a great success with my students. I used Gizmos to introduce the lesson and then provided students with litmus paper so they could experiment and test other fluids.  The achieved a much deeper understanding of pH analysis that I could have hoped for.

While good pedagogical practice requires students have an opportunity to work on hands-on activities with manipulatives and materials in order to develop deeper, conceptual understandings, the sad truth is there is no funding available to support this in public schools today.   Gizmos is one alternative.  I believe this program to be the best chance my Grade 6 and 7 students have to carry out many of these simulations and experiments in a learning environment where there are few materials or even space for exploring scientific inquiry.  Smarter Science is another such framework.  (Read more about getting Smarter About Science here.  Stephen Lippa, an educator from Ontario, has created resources that connect using Gizmos to the Smarter Science Framework and supports integrating the two programs.)

Explore Learning does an excellent job of providing quality programs.  They are responsible for Reflex Math as well.  (I have written about using Reflex with students and at-risk students.)  I like their focus on facilitating teacher record keeping and they have an eye on the assessment piece as well.  Explore Learning offers a 30-day trial so it is worth checking out in the fall.  And definitely check out Cannonball Clowns (Number Line Estimation) - it's my favourite.

Getting Smarter About Science - Inquiry-Based Science Curriculum

Getting Smarter About Science - Inquiry-Based Science Curriculum

Smarter Science is a framework for instruction and learning and has been designed to create and support the process of scientific discovery and exploration in the classroom.  It is a fantastic resource for classroom teachers and science specialists and beats anything I had learned about teaching the subject during teacher training (or in any workshops or Pro-D since).

The framework has many options and levels, and can be used from K to 12.  Students can control or substitute variables to create their own experiments, which allows them to explore questions arising from previous learning. Using this framework brought meaning to what I routinely try to teach. Clearly, I emerged from high school and university science courses without any deep understanding of the processes of science or the richness of the whole experience of scientific discovery. Thankfully, it is never too late to learn. 

The Smarter Science website has a number of resources.  In particular, I found the Steps to Inquiry, the PEOE (Predict, Explain, Observe, Explain) Steps and the Inquiry Cards to be a valuable tool (and now an essential one) in my classroom.   Not sure what the framework is or how to use it?  They have their own YouTube Channel to offer support  And there is a Question Matrix to help guide students towards deeper, critical thinking type questions.

Inquiries I have carried out include Energy Balls, Rice Rabbits, UV Beads and the very popular Instant Snow. Student reaction?  An actual thank you from a 13 year old boy for a Science lesson. There are some Professional Development Opportunities being offered in the summer that would be worthwhile for anyone teaching Science. 

Exploring, Inquiring, Sharing, Communicating....5 Activities for Inquiry

"In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing,not running office automation tools."

---Nicholas Negroponte, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab 

5 Inquiry Activities

click on the link to download this book from iBooks

Use inquiry to determine your running speed.....explore non-Newtonian substances....find photos that demonstrate mathematical concepts.....These are some of the 5 lesson card activities included in this package.  Resources are also included.

These activities could be tweaked and used with students of all ages.  Explain Everything can be used with any subject area or grade level - think Kindergarten students explaining their patterns with a picture, audio or diagrams.  Use the wide variety of iPad apps to challenge students to answer a challenge question or use QR code generators to create a photo hunt suitable to all grade levels.  I can attest that my students loved all these experiences. 

Updates include QR codes to support the Photo Hunt and a resource list for teachers.
 

 (This collection includes three previously published activities....I have decided to publish in 5 activity chunks and am calling this Volume 1).

Effective Use of iPads in the Classroom

There are many reasons to use iPads in the classroom - besides the fact that they are super cool.  Studies have shown that using iPads can increase student engagement and test scores.  These studies also show that there are both three approaches to integration - teacher to student, student to student and student groupwork - and three types of apps - interactive, reference and productivity/creativity.

• Interactive apps require user engagement, but do not create new materials. Examples: Angry Birds, Hotel Tycoon, GraphingCalcHD, MayanMath
• Reference apps provide a wealth of information - just like the reference section of a library. Examples: Bible, NutritionFacts
• Productivity/Creativity apps allow users to create or produce something. Examples: Keynote, Pages, Numbers, drawing and painting apps, music creation, movie editing

What does not work as effective practice is interactive apps being used in a teacher to student learning environment.  A device to student learning environment is perhaps best suited to situations where drill and skill approaches are needed to promote mastery of subject matter - eg. review and homework assignments.  (Think of it as the difference from practicing a musical instrument and creating original music.)

Below are some resources for getting started.

My Curated App Collections

•  This is the access page to my six app collections.  They include:

• Math Apps for Parents
• Essential Apps for Parents
• Literacy Apps for Parents
• Measurement Apps to Use in Math & Science
• Apps to Promote Creativity
• Apps to Promote Mathematical Thinking

Apple's Challenge-Based Learning Site
•  This site provides an explanation of the process in developing challenge-based learning experiences, an explanation of what a 21st century learning environment is and provides insight into what best practice in terms of integration is.  Scholarly but well worth a read.

iPad Effective Use in the Classroom
•  Research into the effective use of integration in the classroom.

Apple in Education Resources
•  A collection of video tutorials, classroom guides, and web pages for educators.

Appitic
•  This is a directory of apps for education that have been recommended and tested by Apple Distinguished Educators

Apple in Education Apps
•  Educational apps organized by subject area

iPads in Education
•  A list of educational apps sorted by subject area

teachwithyouripad
•  Activities for use with the iPad.

3 iPad activities for Students

I love working with students and creating lessons that challenge their thinking.  These three iPad activities for students are classroom tested and will engage your students.  They have been updated with QR Codes for a Primary Math Photo Hunt and Resources for the Effective Use of the iPad.  These activities could be tweaked and used with students of all ages.  Explain Everything can be used with any subject area or grade level - think Kindergarten students explaining their patterns with a picture, audio or diagrams.  Use the wide variety of iPad apps to challenge students to answer a challenge question or use QR code generators to create a photo hunt suitable to all grade levels.  I can attest that my students loved all these experiences.

I have added some information about, and links to, apps that can support mathematical and scientific measurement.  They could be used as tools for these activities or as extension activities. 

Shifting Paradigm in Education

Here is a thought provoking video - do we need to make changes? Probably.


thanks to Ed Smith for the video