Creating Online Resources for US Chem Course

During the 2017-2018 school year Upper School chemistry teacher Jake Nagy used a launch grant to create supplemental informational resources "chemistry online notes" for his students. He wrote,

The concept of Chemistry Online Notes (CON) is inspired by the BACON program currently employed by Prof. Neil Garg of UCLA. Garg's BACON program is an interactive and digital program that assesses and reinforces the learning of students taking his introductory organic chemistry course. I would like to explore the creation and implementation of a similar program designed for the BB&N high school chemistry curriculum. Link to BACON website: https://learnbacon.com/

Mr. Nagy put together PowerPoint files and uploaded them to the class website for each unit. His goal was to create notes not just for use in class, but more so as a stand alone resource for students to access when they've missed class or if they would like to review topics discussed in class. He says the students have gotten used to using them as a supplement and they've really gotten a lot of use out of it. He includes some questions on the slides that allow them to test their understanding as they look through the slides. He plans to continue to refine and improve this new resource for students.

The Makey Makey Learns a New Language! - YEAR TWO!

In the second annual Makey Makey science project, 7th graders designed an interactive objects using a MakeyMakey kit. Touching different locations on the object complete a circuit and produce different sentences they are currently studying at the Middle School.

Science Night 2017

This year's 8th grade Science Knight was billed as an evening of Chemistry Connection. Students prepared demonstrations, created poster boards and prototypes of their inventions. Their invention can be a brand new technology or a new application of an existing technology and address one of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as set out by the United Nations in 2015. Here is the link to the Chemistry of the Future Videos

Students created a prototype of their inventions using many materials and supplies in the maker space (cardboard tubes, cereal boxes, glitter, electronics …) These are some of the questions students have tackled: Why is spider silk so strong? Why does chocolate taste so good to humans but is toxic to dogs? How can hair be used to solve crimes? Can beet juice be used to melt ice on your driveway?

US Math & Physics Opportunities

On 9/29/2016, Harvard will hold a placement exam for the Boston Physics Circle. All high school students from Massachusetts are eligible to participate. A group of 50 high school students will be selected, and continuously instructed throughout the year, preparing them for the first screening exam for the US Physics Olympiad team, known as the "F=ma" exam, to be held in January 2017. The mentoring will be done by undergraduate and graduate students, primarily from Harvard, starting in October and continuing through January. For more info visit http://amir.seas.harvard.edu/boston-physics-circle

Upper School also has a math team that any students can join. These "mathletes" prep and competed in the following competitions. Contact Mr. Rollinson for more information. (Note: you do not have to be a member of the after-school math team in order to compete for BB&N at any of these events.)

• NEML (New England Math League) - monthly 30-minute contests offered during X-blocks (middle of Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar).
• Mandelbrot Competition - monthly 40-minute contest offered during X-blocks (early Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar). 
• AMC 10/12 (American Mathematics Competition) - annual 70-min contest consisting of 25 multiple choice questions offered twice in February. 
• Massachusetts Mathematics Olympiad Competition - late October - 90 minute multiple choice competition.

Upper School Tech Byte #9- Engineering Project

Upper School science teacher Mike shared a project completed by the students in his "Engineering Principles and Practice" course, which is offered as a Science elective.  Students used Google SketchUp, 3D modeling software, to design a space tackling the issue of urban sprawl.  The example Mike shared featured a 100% self-sustainable, all-inclusive community space complete with apartments, underground parking, a restaurant, a gym, a pharmacy, and a clothing store.  The building's highlights included solar panels as well as a geothermal system for heating and cooling.

Upper School Tech Byte #8- Prezi and Kickstarter in Science

Students in Leah’s Current Topics and Research in Science and Technology class completed a unit on climate change. Their assignment was to learn how climate change impacts populations around the world directly and indirectly then create a fundraising campaign to combat climate change impacts in Ethiopia. During the research process, students Skyped with representatives from NGOs.  The two-week project culminated with students' creating Prezi presentations describing the problem and emailing them to all BB&N students asking them to vote for one of three initiatives.

Upper School Current Topics in Research in Science and Technology Addresses Climate Change

Students in Leah’s Current Topics and Research in Science and Technology class recently completed a unit on climate change. Their assignment was to learn how climate change impacts populations around the world directly and indirectly then create a fundraising campaign to combat climate change impacts in Ethiopia. Students created a Prezi describing the problem and emailed the Prezi to all students earlier this week asking them to vote for one of three initiatives. The Prezi can be found here: Climate Change Prezi

-Katrina Fuller

Middle School Science Club Builds Sleds

3/2/15

iPads in the Forensics Classroom

At BB&N, juniors and seniors are able to take Forensics, a lab-based course that stresses the importance of applying scientific principles to law. Students learn the methodology needed to evaluate a crime scene, the proper lab mechanics needed to evaluate evidence, and how to compare samples that are both known and unknown. Procedures in collecting and interpreting criminal evidence are examined and modeled. The students gain a basic understanding of forensic science and how it is used in criminal cases. Forensic experiments include drug analysis, blood typing, hair and fiber analysis, gunshot residue tests, and fingerprint identification.

The Forensics teacher Lisa Conway was awarded a launch grant which allows her to explore the use of iPads in the science classroom.  She is developing curriculum and lesson plans that will allow students to fully integrate iPads into her Forensics and Principles of Chemistry classes.  This week students in Ms. Conway's Forensics class are completing their first crime scene assessment, using the iPads to create accompanying diagrams.   They are using the Magic CSI app to sketch the crime scene.

8th Grade Science Journal

The BB&N 8th grade class of 2014 designed and conducted field studies at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, MA. The Knight Science Web Journal is a compilation of all of those reports. Here is a link to see it: http://tinyurl.com/KnightScience2014

Launch Grant 2012-2013: iPads in the LS Science Classroom

The best laid plans....

At the start of the Launch project, my goal was to use iPads in order to create a portfolio of QR (Quick Response) Codes that contained extension science activities and games for kids to use during choice time or as enrichment. In theory it was a good idea. QR codes are easy to generate. The basic premise is you take a web address enter it into a QR code generator program, and an image like the one below is generated that contains a link to that website, video, or any other digital data.



Young kids, instead of having to type long web addresses, can scan the code (with a QR code scanner app) in order to get to the place or video. It is a great idea and particularly useful for younger students who are still practicing literacy skills, never mind keyboarding!

There are a myriad of free QR code generators including:
GOQR.ME http://goqr.me/
KAYWA http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
SNAPMAZE http://www.snapmaze.com/
And QR scanners (from the APP store – free):
SCAN
QR BARCODE SCANNER
QR READER for iPAD

While in theory this was a good idea, and is a concept worth implementing for next year, I found that I did not have enough time in the science classroom to apply QR code use. Instead, I decided to use the iPad as a tool for the kids to express ideas, and demonstrate the knowledge they gained at particular instances during the year. I used the iPads during three targeted units at each grade level I teach: K, 1 and 4.

Fourth graders used the app Explain Everything which is a screen casting application to keep track of the work they were doing during the construction of the solar cars. They also made a movie for next year’s fourth grade with tips on how to solve some of the most common problems that come up during the design and construction of the solar cars. Below is one of the videos made.

To demonstrate their understanding of the mealworm lifecycle, first graders drew pictures of each of the stages of a mealworm’s growth and animated them with and app called Animator Free. Enjoy the movie below...

As the culminating activity of the motion unit, kindergartners designed and created marble coasters. Part of their responsibility included making sure they got a picture with their coaster. Once the picture was obtained, the kindergartners reviewed the path that the marble took on their track, as they animated their picture using the app called Animator Free. Take a look below!

The moral of the story is...you have to go with the flow with technology! While the original goal of my project changed half way through it, I was surprised to learn what a great tool for the science classroom the iPad is. To quote from the EdTech Teacher folks iPads really did “help make (my...) science classroom a site of active learning and critical thinking, furthering student inquiry and connections with the materials.”
Movie 1

-Maria Elena Derrien

5th Grade Update- April and May in Review

5th graders have spent the last two months programming in a LOGO environment.  LOGO is an oldie but a goodie.  I used it myself as a 5th grader.  It is a great piece of software for the students to use in the spring because it aligns perfectly with the math unit on geometry.  Students programmed a turtle to move around the screen, drawing pictures, and they used their math knowledge to calculate the interior angles of polygons to draw shapes.  Every class they built on their previous knowledge to learn LOGO commands, write their own commands, introduce variables into their commands, and combine commands to create more complicated commands.  For example, each student taught their turtle how to draw a square by writing their own square command and how to draw a triangle by writing their own triangle command using the following commands that the turtle already knew: repeat, forward, and right.  They then combined their square and triangle commands to teach the turtle how to draw a house.  The final culminating project was getting the turtle to draw a scene related to their science "Project O" field trip.

Tufts CEEO STEM Lecture series

After school on Monday, April 22nd, we attended the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach STEM Education lecture series talk given by Jim Slotta from the University of Toronto.  His talk presented "a recent theoretical model of collective inquiry called Knowledge Community and Inquiry, developed by Jim Slotta to guide the designs of complex collaborative inquiry curriculum for secondary science. Typical KCI designs are several months in duration, with students engaged in developing a shared knowledge base that serves as a resource for carefully scripted inquiry projects. In the past several years, Slotta and his team have advanced a sophisticated technology architecture called SAIL (Scalable Architecture for Interactive Learning) to provide scaffolding and real time analytic support for the sequencing of interactions amongst people, materials, tools and activities."  His talk explained KCI and SAIL, as well as a framework for smart classroom research called SAIL Smart Space.  He then presented three curriculum designs from current research projects.  One thing we connected with was the 5th and 6th grade science unit on life cycles using wallcology.

-Megan Haddadi and Jen Lavenberg

Using Technology in the Classroom - the Mobile Experience

Making class a little more fun can be easy with technology. To further expand, "making class easier" can seem a lot like making class harder for the teacher. Now with access to everything from "Angry Birds" to Educational Apps on iPad, to blogs and webcomics on the internet, classes have become inundated with technology to try. In some ways it may seem more difficult to pick through the tangle. If we look at something more specific, say the iPad, then we see it has been geared toward education, but has it been geared toward teaching? Perhaps it is, but not necessarily the way of teaching as experienced previously.
In a recent conversation, the need to adapt teaching styles to new technology arose. One of the participants in the discussion noted that it was good to instigate integration of technology into the classroom, but without understanding how to utilize the technology in new ways it would be useless. Nobody likes to be told they are "behind the times", as seen in the post in the "Bright Ideas" blog titled 17 Signs your classroom is behind the times, but as life gets more and more mobile, noted in the article over at eSchool News, there is an increasing need to familiarize with the mobile technology available not only in life, but also in the classroom (which is purported as the preparation for life).
As a demonstration of the more common way to teach, in a recent article posted at iLearn Technology blog, the author mentions using webcomics to enliven a class*. The webcomic they refer to is "Brown Sharpie" (a mathmatics webcomic**). By using iPad applications and webcomics, the teacher integrated technology into the classroom in a manner similar to the old way where maybe a clipping would be brought in and discussed. Furthermore, the judging of resources for research are eased with Apps from the app list mentioned by Apps in Education in an article on iPad Apps used to research projects.

In a more modern approach, the student is given the power wherein they must utilize the search and collate functions important to life outside the classroom. In an article by Michele O'Dell, two approaches to the iPad in conjunction with curriculum are approached. The Apps in Education blog also has a comprehensive list of strategies posted recently as Mobile Learning and Tablets in Education RoundUp!. If each student has access to an iPad, then learning how to individualize the learning experience through projects like creating an eBook on the iPad might be considered.

Whatever the method of integrating technology into the classroom, hopefully this post assisted in pointing out some resources to assist the process.

*Although these are educational comics, it is always recommended that one checks that the specific comic of the day is up to standard for the age group the viewing thereof is geared toward.

**[In this mathematical and science vein, some other fun math comics are "Spiked Math" (although it is for a slightly more college-aged readership at times), "Peebles Lab" (Apologies to English grammarians for there is no apostrophe - it is a science based comic), "xkcd" (the golden standard of stick-figure geek comics), and "(x, why?)" (a math comic - tends toward puns). Some of the fun of using webcomics is not only in the connection, but also in updating how one interacts with technology. Some of the webcomics (Brown Sharpie) also include apps.]

4th Graders Create Solar Powered Vehicles

Prior to introducing my students to the Renewable Energy Kits purchased through my LAUNCH grant, I decided the fourth graders needed a background on how renewable energy works. I had them design and build solar powered vehicles out of Radio Shack solar cells and motors, as well as spare parts from LEGO MindStorms kits. A few days ago we had some sun, and we and tested our vehicles outside. We realized we need a more intense sun to create enough current to power the motor and will wait until the spring to try again! As we move forward, fourth graders will be working with other alternative energy sources (hydro power, wind power and fuel cell technology) while exploring the educational kits purchased through the LAUNCH grant. Check back shortly for an update on how the kits are going!

-Maria Elena Derrien

EdTechTeacher at Harvard this Summer

This summer EdTechTeacher will be hosting its summer professional development workshops at Harvard University. EdTechTeacher is led by Tom Daccord and Justin Reich who both came to our technology professional development day last year. Available workshops include:

• Teaching Science with Technology
• Teaching History with Technology (9th annual)
• Primary Sources 2.0
• Teaching English with Technology (5th annual)
• Dynamic Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards
• Teaching the Elementary Grades with Technology
• Teaching Foreign Language with Technology
• 21st Century School Leadership: Leading Change in Changing Times
• The Best Web 2.0 Tools & Apps for Teachers
• Geography and Maps 2.0
  

Registration is already open.

4th Grade Excel Project

A couple of weeks ago, 4th grade students visited the New England Aquarium on a science field trip. During their visit the students collected data on the frequency of jelly pulses. Upon their return, the students entered their findings into Excel spreadsheets, creating charts that compare the average pulses per minute for large jellies versus small jellies.

Best of TED

TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) is a conference held at various times and places around the world that hosts some of the most fascinating talks from some of the most amazing individuals from across the world. Tickets to TED are highly prized, but luckily for the world, the organizers put all of the presentations up on their website (www.ted.com) for the whole world to see.

There are literally thousands of talks on the website, so I've decided to share some of my own personal favorites with this forum. For my opening post, I've gone with one of my all-time favorites by Hans Rosling, a professor in global health. I love this for several reasons: He asks us to re-assess our understanding and use of the word "Third-world" when we think about countries around the world, he does an incredible job of demonstrating what good data analysis can do, he walks us through a wonderful online tool at www.gapminder.org, and he makes it all so much fun.

I hope you enjoy!

Edutopia is a Great Resource

One of my favorite online journals for education is edutopia which is published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. They have great ideas for integrating technology across the curriculum. The examples and ideas have all been developed by teachers, so they are relevant and classroom-tested. Here are a few examples:

• Technology ideas for math and science
• Bullying prevention
• Project-based learning
• Online learning

You can sign up for their free weekly e-newsletter if you want to get a few good ideas each week!

~ Demetri

SmartBoard in Upper School Science

Newsflash- new SmartBoard in the Upper School Science department! Rachel Riemer gets a SmartBoard in her classroom as part of the science lab construction over the summer. Since Rachel has wanted this SmartBoard in her classroom for years, the board has been in constant use since its installation. For tips and tricks, see Rachel.

In addition, please see the resource pages below:

Teaching with SmartBoards

Smart Exchange:

Math (Algebra)

Science

English/Language Arts

History/Social Studies

Geography

World Languages

Art

Music

-Letitia