A couple weeks ago, Bob Hirshon posted about AAAS and Science NetLinks participating in the USA Science and Engineering Festival and what a great time we had. AAAS recently posted a video of our activities and I thought I'd pass it on to the Thinkfinity Community. As mentioned before, it was an incredible event and we look forward to next year and maybe we'll see you there!

AAAS at the USA Science and Engineering Festival

• Science NetLinks, Science of the Senses teaching resources

• Article from AAAS about the festival

For more STEM related posts, visit and join the All About Science group.

Suzanne

Project Director

AAAS Science NetLinks

On February 1, 2012, I retired for the second time. I taught and served as a department administrator for 28 ½ years retiring in 1993. During these years I taught in five different schools in five very different communities. Upon my first retirement, I joined an educational project that allowed me to stay right in the middle of where my interests lay. Over the next 18 years, I was a library clerk, researcher, trainer, consultant, and the state coordinator for Thinkfinity in Illinois.

In my blogs, I would like to meander through some of the experiences that resulted in me being the teacher, trainer, administrator, and consultant that I am today. Every two weeks, I will present you with an experience that I had and what I learned from it. I encourage you to share your experiences so that we all can improve our abilities to meet the needs of students. One of the things that resonates with me is the number of resources that are now available through Thinkfinity that would have enhanced my ability to meet the needs of students and bridge the gap between the electives and academics. In each of my blogs I will identify resources available through Thinkfinity that might be utilized.

Today’s blog is about how I learned that my students know a lot more than I thought or measure and how this changed my teaching mode. As a career and technical education specialist, I have recognized the value of application learning since my first coursework at Purdue. However, I didn’t realize that what I was teaching had already been learned by many of my students using different methods and/or terminology.

 

---

The Problem

For many years, I taught cooperative education and consumer education. In both of these programs students were required to learn about the  job-getting process: from developing a resume; to filling out an  application blank; to preparing for an interview; to interviewing; and  finishing with follow-up. One year in summer school, I had a Summer  Cooperative Education Class of 28 students. Many of these students were not students who liked school or academic learning. Several had had  problems with the law and most were behind in credits towards graduation.

We started the job-getting unit with the development of a resume. As always, I started with introducing my students to a very simple software program that they could use to develop their resumes. I then moved on to introducing them to the development of a Job or Career Objective for their resume. I used the same presentation, handouts, practice sheets that I had used in the past. The next day, I found that only two of the students had written usable Job or Career Objectives. 

To say the least, I was frustrated. I had never had this experience before. I replayed my presentation in my head and couldn’t see anything lacking. At the end of the session, I was in the faculty work room and told two of the Language Arts Teachers of my experience and frustration. One of the teachers said that she had never written a resume and didn’t know what a Job or Career Objective was. I explained what a Job or Career Objective to her in the same manner that I had used with the students. Her reaction was that it sounded as if I was asking them to write thesis statements about themselves. 

Was the Problem Terminology?

This was my light bulb moment! I had never thought about the Job or Career Objective as anything but an objective. Furthermore I had never thought about a thesis statement being used anywhere else but as the basis when writing a term paper. Barb gave me some ideas for using the “thesis statement” as the basis for reopening the discussion the next day. She even shared a handout that she used with freshmen and sophomores on writing thesis statements.

The next day, I used Barb’s handout and asked the students to go back to their original objective statement. Was it a thesis statement about him or her? What did they need to do to make this statement usable in a resume? It took them less than 30 minutes to redo their statements to be usable in the resume. One of the most common reactions was – “I didn’t know that you used a thesis statement for any other purpose outside of writing a term paper.” My response was I didn’t either and I had been doing it for years!!

This made me much more conscious about what I was teaching in relation to what the academic teachers taught. From that point on I tried to share with academic teachers what I was doing and through discussion, identifying the differences in the terminology that I was using, to introduce concepts with what they were using. As I became more conscious of this need, my use of academic terminology increased. Several of the academic teachers began to ask our Career and Technical Education staff about their terminology and in some cases this led to teaming together on learning activities. 

Some Thinkfinity Resources

Resume Component Checklist

9 - 12 | Worksheet

This student reproducible, from a ReadWriteThink lesson, provides a chart listing several possible components that students may choose to include in a resume.

Resume Writing Tips

This student reproducible, from a ReadWriteThink lesson, provides tips for students to use when writing a resume.

Writing a Thesis Statement

9 - 13 | Worksheet

This resource from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL), is part of a large collection of handouts and exercises on grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Position Statements

6 - 8 | Worksheet

This student reproducible, from a ReadWriteThink lesson, provides students with information about writing position statements, along with an example.

Writer's Handbook

6 - 13 | Collection

This page, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center, provides extensive material for writers. Included are resources on the writing process.

Your Thoughts and Questions

• If you are an elementary teacher, do you draw parallels between the terminology used to teach language arts, math, science, social studies, art, etc.?
• Do you share your unit terminology with other teachers?
• Do you team teach lessons, units, curriculum with other teachers? When planning, does the difference in terminology become a discussion topic?
• Do you want or need more information on this topic?

Please post your thoughts in my discussion,
Is the Language the Same?

Debbie Potts began her career in January 1965 as a Home Economics Teacher in a brand new suburban school. Over the next twenty-eight years she taught in a total of 5 very different high schools that varied from a small rural community with approximately 125 students’ grades 7-12 to a large suburban high school with just over 5,000 students’ grades 10-12. During that time, she taught both in her major area of home economics and in her chemistry minor. In addition she was a department chairperson in the extremely large high school and the department coordinator for all of the career and technical education in the second largest school where she taught. In 1993 she took early retirement and for the next eighteen years, she worked for a project that is funded through the State Board of Education through a state university. During this time she worked with both Marco Polo and Thinkfinity. She retired on February 1, 2012.

I invite you to explore the following  Thinkfinity resources and activities that may help some targeted learning styles:

	1.  Linguistic—Need a fun activity for your student to express themselves about a topic? Try Comic Creator.
2.  Logical-Mathematical—is your student a natural problem solver? Challenge them with this Arrange Chairs at a restaurant interactive.
	3.  Visual/Spatial—Working on geometry skills? Your visual/spatial learner will like this Learning the Shapes interactive.
4.  Musical—Does your student like to tap to the music? Let them try this Quakin Rhythms or learn more about Hip Hop.
	5.  Bodily Kinesthetic—What better way to learn about a culture than through dance!
6.  Interpersonal—Is your young writer ready to publish? Try this Printing Press.
	7.  Intrapersonal—Does your student love researching about animals?
8.  Naturistic—Here we are in the natural world—have your naturist explore the Big Cat problem.

Please post your thoughts in my discussion,
What online resources do you use to teach to a particular learning style?

Catherine Giddens grew up in NC and came to Charleston, SC, to attend the College of Charleston and has never left. She has worked for the SC Department of Education for 12 years. She enjoys working with instructional tech coaches across the state.

If you’re here, I’m guessing you’re not a skeptic. But many educators still don’t trust the many new technologies moving into schools and classrooms lately. Some fear it’s a message that they are not as necessary anymore. Others think it makes us lazy. Even after 16 years working in education, I am certain that we do not yet have all the answers. Some educators are embracing terrific new technologies to drive student learning. Others—my earlier self included—are slow to get onboard. For the next few months I will be blogging here to find that intersection between technology and student learning, and whether you’re a teacher, parent, principal, or anyone who wants to join us, I welcome you to the discussion!

Where do you fall on the spectrum? Were you a believer from the start, or did it take convincing? Are you somewhere in between? How do you approach the topic with colleagues who disagree? And how do you make sure you are ensuring that the technologies you use are actually empowering students to learn more than they were without them?

Every two weeks I’ll either ask a question that needs your experiences to answer, put forth an opinion for you to respond to, or highlight what other educators are doing to merge technology with learning, whether their students’ or their own.

At the end of today’s post is a list of possible topics. So read on, pick your favorites, and I’ll get started. I’m thrilled that Thinkfinity is interested in exploring these questions for educators to figure out, and look forward to learning from all of you.

This year I returned to the classroom after a four-year hiatus. When I left, Facebook and Twitter had not yet saturated students’ lives, and my students did not use laptops in class. There were online resources for teachers, but it paled in comparison to what exists today.

In my new job working as a writer for a school system, I was issued a Blackberry−which, as I understood it, was to be glued to my forehead as a reminder to all incoming information that I was a willing receiver. By the time I left, the mini-mouse-tracking-ball thingee was dangling off the face, and my carpal tunnel thumbs were happy to relinquish it to wherever technology goes to die.

But my forehead would not have to be accessory-less for long. I was launching a freelancing career that would allow me to both teach and write, and I had a lot to learn. I needed tools such as Twitter and LinkedIn to bring in business.  I had to learn about SEO optimization, keywords and social media best practices, and I dragged myself to technology-related trainings I never would have chosen in years past.

So when I entered the classroom again, I was curious. How would all this learning change my teaching? One thing I knew…

I am not cool.

I have never trusted a technology just for being cool or shiny, and I am still more blown away by a well-crafted sentence than a great new gadget. I have owned two cell phones in nearly a decade, the first one chunky and unbending, and the second a racy pink Razr that let me fake coolness for a few years, until the number panel kept falling off (not a deal breaker).

I drive a 2003 Saturn that I will not replace until I have to. I blame this in part on a grandmother who grew up during the Depression and who used the same iron, phone, blender and refrigerator for 65 years. The rest I blame on my parents, who didn’t replace their Dodge Colt until it erupted in flames while I was at the movies one night; the earlier Dodge Ram van met a similar fate, and in its last days was prone to dropping various parts from the bottom carriage on the way home, dragging them along to an embarrassing scraping sound (my parents were not prone to embarrassment as their teenagers were).

However, I am not a lost cause—just a loyal one. Once a product proves its worth, I am loyal to it as long as it stays loyal to me.

What does this mean for student achievement? Where do technology and student learning intersect?

Before, while other teachers experimented with shared drop-boxes for collecting student work, I preferred pen and paper. I adopted electronic grading systems with a grumble and preferred face-to-face discussion over PowerPoint presentations that broke eye contact with students. I didn’t trust tools that made things easier because I worried they would make us lazy. I was, possibly, a little militant about it.

We needed to be reading, absorbed and concentrating, not skimming online! We needed to be fired up, not falling asleep in muted classrooms staring at screens!

But by the time I left the classroom, I was beginning to suspect I may be wrong in my prejudice against technology. For example, once I did adopt the electronic grading system, which allowed parents to view their children’s grades from home, I loved what it did for parent engagement. So I added an email list sending parents weekly updates on course content, including “dinner table discussion” questions and suggesting ways parents could help their children prepare for class in the coming week. I was floored by the response from parents, who reported stimulating dinner conversations and were glad to have ways to elicit more than the one-word responses from their teenagers about school.

Back in the classroom after my hiatus, I wondered about all that had changed in just a few years. Twitter was keeping me up-to-date on new research that later appeared on my syllabus. I had become certified in a new system that would allow me to teach my course online. The possibilities for plagiarism had become a whole new monster. Teachers had different policies on the use of laptops and other electronic devices in class. Were they a distraction or a tool? I heard widely divergent views from educators.

How could I adopt new technologies for the good? Could I get my students to follow Grammar Girl on Facebook? Would it make a difference? Did online courses work? How could I learn from other educators in ways that I hadn’t before? Most of all—considering the mistrust that is still out there about ineffective uses of technology in education (e.g. “Who needs a teacher when you can plop the kid in front of a computer to learn?”)− how can we push against skepticism to find what works best for students’ learning and our own?

What do you think?

To answer these questions, educators need to hear and share what’s working. But we also need to talk about the growing pains. We need educators who are sold on technology as an effective tool to drive student learning, and those who still don’t trust it to engage in the discussion.  So share your ideas and invite your colleagues to join. Let’s differentiate between what’s shiny and cool, and what works. I am not willing to concede that technology is the silver bullet for improving education in this country, but nor can I call myself a responsible educator if I’m not willing to consider and explore technologies that can improve my practice or help me become a better teacher.  Here are some topics I’m thinking about for the next few months. Please chime in on any that look interesting to you, or any you’d like me to consider that aren’t here! Future posts will likely be shorter, but I wanted to introduce myself here, and welcome everyone who would like to join this blog community to engage. I look forward to hearing from you!

• We don’t have to pick between technology and teachers. I don’t care if we live on flying saucers and send kids to school in spaceships. Teachers, we will always need you!
• Modes of learning with technology. Can you be linked in, online and all over the world, and still…be still? Research on the impact of stillness and “unplugging” on cognition and learning; and how teachers can create a balance, teach kids to navigate all the input in ways that will promote learning and concentration.
• Teaching as Art in an Age of Data. If you saw “The Artist,” you saw one actor’s struggle with the transition from silent film to sound. There are so many parallels to what is happening in education. There is also a new book by Eric Booth positing Life as Art that I suspect applies to the craft of teaching as well. Here I would explore the tension between adapting to change and moving forward via new technologies, while preserving the art of teaching—what we need to preserve, what we need to let go of, why teachers feel divided on this and why it’s worth embracing the transition.
• Impact of technology as our main vehicle of communication. Between students and other students, and between teachers and students. 
  • A recent study shows teenagers prefer to interact via technologies versus face-to-face, and examines the impact on relationship (relating as “projected self” versus the real, vulnerable selves we all are in a face-to-face moment.  In my view, the train has left the station on this and social media selves are to stay. But I am interested in how educators and parents respond to it, helping students to navigate classroom and build relationships within this dynamic. Maybe students are just learning another language, and we can teach them to be fluent in both.
  • Communication between teachers and students via technologies (i.e. districts restricting teachers from using Facebook to communicate with students. This seems to throw out the baby with the bathwater to me, rather than finding out a way that can work. i.e. separate class Facebook pages from personal accounts).
• Interview/profiles – of educators, parents, students on any of the issues above, or more!

Please post your thoughts in my discussion,
Are you a Skeptic, Believer, or Somewhere In Between?

Kaitlin Murphy is a writer who has worked in education for 16 years, primarily as a middle and high school teacher, but also as a college writing instructor, and a teacher at an incarceration facility, a GED program for teen mothers, a town community school and currently at a community college in New Jersey. She worked at the DC Public Schools for three years as a writer and is a freelance writer and communications consultant.

Get a head start on finding the perfect lessons, interactives, and related resources to ensure your students meet the Math Common Core Standards.

Thinkfinity's Content Partners have created a variety of materials aligned to the national and state Common Core Standards for Mathematics and have made them easy to find using our State Standards Search Engine.

Start by finding your state's Common Core Standards from the pull-down menu. Scroll down through the initial state listings and look for a second set that is designated as your state's version of the Common Core. Then choose your grade level, Mathematics standards, and you are ready to begin browsing.

At the next screen, select the specific Common Core Standard you want to address and find Thinkfinity lessons, interactives or other resources, ready to use in your classroom, by clicking on the "View Results" link.

The Common Core Mathematics Standards address both skills and knowledge in mathematics as well as the application of mathematical processes in authentic problem-solving situations. A fifth grade teacher, for example, may decide to help students "Solve word problems involving addition and subtraction of fractions..." [CC5.NF.2] using an Illuminations lesson entitled A Brownie Bake. This requires students to apply measurement skills as they determine the correct amount of each ingredient and also assesses their understanding of fractions as they decide how to divide and share the brownies with their classmates.

To help 8th graders "Use the equation of a linear model to solve problems..." [CC.SP.8], a teacher could select the Line of Best Fit interactive that allows students to plot a set of data on a coordinate grid and determine the equation for the line of best fit.

Follow these steps for a quick and practical way to gather ready-to-use resources that will help your students achieve the goals of the Common Core Standards.

Join this TALK IT OUT discussion to share your favorite Thinkfinity Resource for addressing the Math Common Core Standards and find out what other educators are also recommending.

Be sure to visit the NCTM-sponsored group, Learning Math in the Thinkfinity Community, for more information on using digital resources to support your mathematics instruction.

Are you a trainer, coach, or mentor? Share your strategy for helping your colleagues locate Common Core materials in our Professional Development Community.

Science NetLinks was recently awarded 3 Interactive Media Awards for its newly redesigned website. Science NetLinks won the Best in Class award in the education, nonprofit and science/technology categories.

For most of 2011 the Science NetLinks team worked with the design firm, Blenderbox, to evalute all Science NetLinks content and brainstorm possibilities for effectively showcasing its resources on the redesigned website. It was important to Science NetLinks for users to find resources easily and to show users content that they probably didn't know existed. After many, many discussions and meetings, Blenderbox, had the information they needed to create some incredibly dynamic and smart designs. The new site was launched at the end of October 2011 and in early 2012, the site got noticed.

As stated in an article published by AAAS, "Anna Lawrence, spokesperson for the Interactive Media Awards, explained that Science NetLinks was entered in the competition under the science/technology category. 'The judges were so impressed that they gave it an award under the nonprofit and education categories as well,' she said. 'To win three awards for one entry is very rare and is just a testament to the quality and professionalism of this work.'"

The Science NetLinks team is very proud of the work they accomplished during the redesign and of design and navigation that Blenderbox developed.  Be sure to check out the new site and take a look at the blog post, Take Us for a Test Drive, to learn about some of the new features.

For more science posts and discussions, visit and join the All About Science group.

April is:

• Math Awareness Month
• National Poetry Month
• National Humor Month

With such a glorious coincidence of human-created holidays, we should do something big. Monumental, even. But what? We could prepare a major April Fools prank, such as preparing a fake video about spaghetti growing on trees or publishing an article about how the Alabama legislature passed a law setting π = 3. But those have already been done, so let’s do something a little different…

Announcing the Humorous Math Poem Contest!

That’s right! Submit your original entries of humorous math poems. The format is entirely up to you.

• Try your hand at the highly mathematical haiku.
• Author a sonnet about your love of numbers. 
• Use ALGEBRA to create an acrostic poem.
• Or, get a little seedy with a limerick about doing problem sets late at night.

The only rule, really, is that your submission must be completely original. Please don’t copy a poem from another website or transcribe one of J. A. Lindon’s gems.

Submit all original poems to this discussion:
Humorous Math Poetry Contest : submit poems here.

On April 30, we will put the names of all who submit a poem into a hat and draw a winner. The winning author will receive an autographed copy of Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks.

Good luck, and have fun with this task in your classroom or as a personal assignment!

To get the creative juices flowing, you can read a few classics below, or check out The Square Root of Three.

If you’ve checked out Smithsonian’s History Explorer—the National Museum of American History’s online portal for interactives, lesson plans, videos, podcasts, artifacts and other educational resources—in the past few months, you’ve probably noticed some changes.  The Education Outreach team here has been hard at work making the site more user-friendly and adding new resources. 

In addition to giving the site a facelift, we’ve added a few new tools:

• Make cross-curricular connections: Looking for interdisciplinary resources that link American history and language arts? Or math? Or visual or performing arts?  All you need to do is filter by the related subject to find the resources you need.
• Find books: To facilitate language arts and social studies integration, we’ve added a book search tool to the site.  Just click on the books tab and search by grade level, era, keyword to find award winning picture books, biographies, historical fiction and more for all ages.   You’ll also find related books listed at for search results.   Dan Gasteazoro, a fourth grade teacher from Eagan, Minnesota writes that:  “[The books page] is great! Literacy is huge with all of the testing that we have to prepare kids to take on a yearly basis; finding ways to meet all those expectations but bring in real good quality reading that’s the one of the harder things to do.  I can’t stop all the time to have social studies every day, but…I can bring social studies to my literacy time of day.  Having a list like this is really important. It will help me manage my load.”
• Check out resources by theme: Looking for the very best of the best of what we have on major themes such as westward expansion, immigration, or civil rights on our new themes page. Find 6 of our best resources on these themes and related books.  Be sure to check back to this page regularly—we are updating this regularly to reflect anniversaries, heritage months, and new resource collections.
• Stay in touch: We’re making it even easier to stay in touch with us and connect with other educators.  In addition to links to our Twitter feed, our email newsletter, and the Museum’s Facebook page, you’ll find conversations from our Community group, History Explorers, on the main page on and on the teacher resource page.  See what fellow educators are discussing and share your ideas, or share your own questions and get feedback from museum educators and other group members.

To learn more about the site and its new features, join us for a webinar on Tuesday, April 10 from 3:30 to 4:30.

Naomi

National Museum of American History