A while back, a teacher on a listserv asked for some ideas and resources for teaching the science of the phases of the moon.  Veteran teacher Eric Plett shared this great hands-on activity that I thought merited a blog post of its own.

1.  Darken your room and get a bright light source like an overhead projector.  Turn it on and project it toward your students.

2.  Give each student a tennis ball (or a white Styrofoam ball that you can buy at Michael’s is even better).  Have them hold the ball out away from their face and slightly above their heads (so that they don’t immediately experience a ‘lunar eclipse’).

3.  They can start with the ball opposite the light source – full moon phase.  Then while maintaining the ball position they turn their bodies to see the phases of the moon.  Have them turn in unison and you can call out the phases that they will see.  They can experience a solar and lunar eclipse when the ball obstructs their line of sight to the light and when their heads block the light hitting the ball.

Says Eric: “It was a great ‘real’ experience for my students and they not only knew the phases but the why behind them.  It is usually an epiphany for them.”

Another activity on the moon is on one of my Science Teaching Tips podcast, from the Exploratorium, about the relative size of the full moon:

When the Moon Hits Your Eye.  What coin would just barely cover the full moon? You may be surprised. TI director (and recovering astrophysicist) Linda Shore explains how our brains distort the actual size of the moon.     Download mp3

[UPDATE]

Since I posted this, I got several comments on my Facebook page from readers:

David Colarusso says:  I used to do this with my astronomy students, but might I recommend tangerines over tenis balls. It helps with the digestion of a new concept if you can actually digest the subject of your study.

Paul Doherty says:  Hi Steph,  I go out during the day when the moon is in the sky with a white ball. I hold it up in the sunlight right next to the moon in the sky….it has the same phase as the moon.  for the same reason.

Helen Fields says:  “We did this in my earth science class (with a white styrofoam ball, ’cause you can put a pencil into it and hold it that way) in about 1994 and it was great – I still remember the phases of the moon that way. “

Our latest podcast in the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears webzine has been posted.  This is a bimonthly webzine for elementary educators, to integrate polar science into their teaching.   This month’s webzine is on arctic peoples, and the podcast features a story on how light disappears and reappears in the arctic each year, that you can play right in your classroom.  Plus, suggestions on how to use this story with your elementary students.

The Boy Who Found the Light

The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has been experimenting with using podcasts in their nursing courses, though it was four years ago so things might have changed.  They discovered several things along the way:

Students needed to be educated that they could listen to podcasts on any MP3 player or on their computer (and did not need an iPod).  Most listened to them on their computer.  How did they use the podcasts?  Did they use them to review, or as a substitute for attending class?  86% used them as a review, and only 14% used them instead of going to class.  These are consistent with other studies.  Most (79%) used them at home, as opposed to at the gym or on their commute.  So, they’re not using them as “mobile learning” per se, they’re sitting at their computer to listen to them, for the most part.  Also, they downloaded the podcasts as soon as they were available (51%) as opposed to right before the exam (12%).  Other studies, she said, have found that only 40% download immediately, and 60% later or before the exam.  Some preferred the audio podcast because it was easier, but a few students said they preferred having the powerpoint slides along with the audio.  These survey results are at www.uccs.edu/bethel.

It may be that recording the student lecture isn’t the best use of student time, to re-listen to the whole lecture.  However, most people are podcasting the entire lecture.  Some students specifically seek out courses where podcasts are being used.

Podcasts can be helpful in the following ways, found some studies:

• clarifying difficult concepts
• reviewing concepts
• repetition of material
• helping with note taking
• preparing for exams
• catching up on missed classes
• ESL students who need to repeat words

Lessons learned

• Check disk space and batteries before class
• Repeat student questions
• Start each ‘segment’ of the lecture with a title
• Create multiple short files (15-20 minutes) as opposed to entire lectures
• Archive previously recorded lectures in case the current one has technical difficulties
• Ownership issues can be sticky.  Careful of using images from textbooks because you’re then distributing copyrighted content.
• One idea is to record the lecture in advance (though some faculty complain that this feels stilted without an audience) and require students to listen to it in advance.  Then use classtime for discussion.  Some instructors have found this to be a great alternative to the traditional class lecture.

I’ve been trying to figure out for myself what I think of podcasted lectures.  I could see it being helpful when you’ve spaced out for a moment, to go back and review what the instructor said.  It’s an alternative reference, like the textbook.  But it also seems that it requires a relatively sophisticated student to use such a resource to enhance their learning.  Learning doesn’t happen by transmission, and a freshman might think she’s studying by just listening to the lecture again.  They need to be going to the content with a purpose, to try to understand the material or answer a specific question or fill in their notes, I think.  I could imagine the podcasts being even more helpful with some sort of guiding questions to direct students’ engagement with the podcasts.

How did they do it?

• Used portable digital recorders (Olympus; $~70) which can record up to 6 hours and are easy to use.  However, the file then needed to be compressed to MP3 using Audacity ($free).
• They eventually started using the Zoom H2 recorder ($199), which records directly to MP3 and has omnidirectional recording (allowing students to hear their questions during class, not just the instructor).  They’re very pleased with this recorder.
• It’s been difficult to get instructors to break up their lectures into different segments.  Recordings of 15-20 minutes would be ideal.
• In the course website gave students instructions on how to download the podcasts from iTunes
• They then upgraded to Leopard and, with quite a bit of difficulty, got Podcast Producer configured.  Apparently the new Podcast Producer II will avoid many of the difficulties that they experienced, especially regarding workflows.
• They are also now going to iTunes U, but for now have just been using a “subscribe in iTunes” link on the course website (which is a wiki/blog site).  Each entry in the blog is a new audio file, but there is also a subscription link.

I would be interested to hear about iTunes U from people who have been using it.  I don’t quite understand what it is other than a central depot for university/education related podcasts?

Our latest Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears podcast from the NSDL is up!

What’s For Dinner? Teaching Arctic Food Chains

We already know why polar bears don’t eat penguins, but what do they eat? In this episode, we’ll share a simple activity that opens a window to understanding a unique ecosystem as one example of a food chain – the Arctic Ocean. For more information on ecosystems and food chains, see Issue 13 – Tundra: Life in the Polar Extremes.

Photo by Ansgar Walk

What an appropriate title.  I am posting the very last episode of my Science Teaching Tips podcast on Podomatic, and at the same time it has been given new life over at the Exploratorium Teacher Institute website!

The last Podomatic podcast episode is here:  The World’s Cheapest Electroscope.

Dying to know whether something’s positively or negatively charged?  TI staff educator Modesto Tamez explains an easy – and dirt cheap – way to probe the electric charge of the world.

Visit the new beautiful webhome of the series. Go check it out, and subscribe to get each new podcast episode — full of the accumulated wisdom of the wonderfully creative folks over at the Exploratorium’s Teacher Institute (where I had the honor and delight of working for about 2 years).

I am a science education and communication consultant — see http://sciencegeekgirl.com for more information about my services.

My readers were so helpful when I was writing my article on why physics teachers should read blogs, so I’m coming to you again for your expert advice on another short article.  This one is on how elementary teachers can use podcasts in their classroom, and what podcasts they should consider listening to.  Or, alternatively, when not to use podcasts as an elementary teacher!  This is for the National Science Digital Library’s Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears webzine.

Any suggestions are appreciated, thank you!

I recently posted an entry about one of the best jobs I’ll never have – a reporter job at NPR.  But I did have the good fortune to dip my toes into the yummy warm pool that is NPR for a summer, when I was a AAAS Mass Media intern at NPR’s Science Desk.  You can hear the clips when I was on the air on NPR here.  I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to have your name mispronounced on the air!

Anyway.  One of the things that fascinated me (and still does) is how people make their voices sound so conversational when they’re reading script.  Try it.  It’s not easy.  When I did my first voicing, I kept trying to sound genuine.  I thought I’d do OK, and then Richard Harris would shake his head no…   Finally he grabbed me and brought me back into the studio, and sat across from me at the table and said “Tell me the story!” and shook his head enthusiastically and listened to me with rapt attention.  My voice changed so that I was underlining words with my voice, using the right emphasis, and telling him the story, instead of reading a blank script.

This gets easier with practice, of course, and I’m able to relax more easily now and (at least some of the time) make a script come out sounding good, even if I’m in a room alone.  I can hear my own voice, and use it as a paintbrush on the words, and can tell for the most part when I’ve done it well or not.  It’s still easier when there’s someone there.

And of course the NPR reporters get more practiced at this with time, but it can still take some work to make your voice sound lively.  One of the funniest things I ever saw was David Kestenbaum, who could read the phone book and sound interesting.  He does this funny thing when he’s recording, twitching his body and jumping a little, to sound lively.  I feel bad writing this, even — these are the private things that we do as writers, be it writing your first draft in your favorite bunny slippers, or putting colored post-it notes all over one wall of your office to outline a novel.  We do funny things, but whatever works for our creative process, go for it!  So, I’m not making fun of David at all, but rather, it was interesting to see that someone with such an interesting voice has these tricks to keep it lively.

Another funny thing was dear old Bob Edwards on Morning Edition.  You could tell when he was the one talking (even though you were outside the studio and couldn’t really see people’s mouths moving.  He would bob his head up and down in time with his words, “And I’m” (nod) “Bob” (nod) “Edwards” (nod).

I also heard of a reporter who put a picture of their grandmother on the studio desk and told her the story.

Joanne Silberner showed me a trick, too, of writing out your script with one idea per line (regardless of where the sentence breaks were.  For example, my All Things Considered story on the first cloned horse:

HOST

This week italian scientists reported the birth of the first cloned horse. The foal, named Prometea (pro-ME-tee-ah), joins a growing list of cloned animals. NPR’s Stephanie Chasteen reports.

CHASTEEN

The horse is the second equine species to be cloned. Just a few months ago US researchers successfully cloned a mule, named Idaho Gem.  This latest cloning success comes from the Italian firm CIZ.  The new foal, Prometea, is different from her cloned cousins in a few key ways.
She was born to the very mare whose DNA was used to clone her. This is the first clone that’s an identical twin of its birth mother.  And unlike the mules, Prometea was created from an adult cell… This means that if a mature horse can be cloned, then breeders could duplicate an exceptional animal even if it could no longer breed.  The research is published in today’s issue of the journal Nature.

Stephanie Chasteen, NPR News, Washington

Becomes

CHASTEEN

The horse is the second equine species to be cloned.
Just a few months ago US researchers successfully cloned a mule, named Idaho Gem.
This latest cloning success comes from the Italian firm CIZ.
The new foal, Prometea, is different from her cloned cousins in a few key ways.
She was born to the very mare whose DNA was used to clone her.
This is the first clone that’s an identical twin of its birth mother.
And unlike the mules, Prometea was created from an adult cell…
This means that if a mature horse can be cloned, then breeders could duplicate an exceptional animal even if it could no longer breed.
The research is published in today’s issue of the journal Nature.

Stephanie Chasteen, NPR News, Washington

It’s amazing how differently you read something depending on how it’s written out.  This helps your voice highlight the key ideas, instead of slurring on from one idea to the next.

Also note that this piece took 2 days to write, in order to interview the researcher, and condense years of work and societal implications into 1 minute of script.  One minute of script is not very much, as you can see!

I went to voice coach lessons with David Kestenbaum and Ari Shapiro (yes, I went to biweekly meetings with two incredibly intelligent and attractive young men, tough job!).  This was interesting because, even though David’s voice is so good, he didn’t like how he sounds sing-songy.  And as I listened to him, I realized he’s right — he has a tendency to hit every 5th word or so, regardless of whether it needs emphasis.  Like, “In today’s budget analysis, the congressional leaders decided that they needed to take some time to debate the matter.”  Listen to him on Planet Money and see if he’s still doing it.

Another thing was all the different tools available to your voice.  You can stretch out a word to emphasize its importance, or you can hit it louder, or you can be more subtle.  For instance, in a story on the shuttle, they were referring to the “delicate heat-shielding tiles.”  It was more important that the tiles were delicate, instead of heat-shielding (since we were talking about how they had broken off).  So we wanted to hit “delicate” but you don’t want to hit it like “DELICATE”.  That just doesn’t work with the sense that you’re trying to convey.  So, you hit it, well, delicately.  Say it like it’s a piece of china you don’t want to break.  Lightly on the tongue, with a bit of uplift.

This is what I love about audio and the voice. There is so much chance for expression!

We’re up to Episode 67 of the Science Teaching Tips podcast! Woo hoo, over a year of science education podcasts!  This one is with one of the most brilliant folks at the Exploratorium (and that’s saying a lot) — Dr. Thomas Humphrey makes my brain spin.  And it’s because he’s just so interested in so many things, and has the ability to make connections between a dizzying array of different pieces of the world.  In this podcast he talks about why he has so much fun teaching, and how a lot of that fun comes from putting those pieces together — from realizing he doesn’t have the answer to every question, and seeing the fun in finding out the answer to those that he doesn’t know.

Listen to the episode – Let’s Find Out!

I’ve got a new podcast series out, and this one is my best yet.  I’ve been hired by the wonderful folks at the National Science Digital Library (they provide a central depot for great digital media for teaching science) to create a podcast for elementary educators on using polar science in their teaching.  We (me and my co-conspirator, the multi-talented Robert Payo) focus on misconceptions and myths about science and how to address them with science from the poles. This is part of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears webzine.

Visit the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears Podcast!

So far we’ve done a show about the geology and volcanoes of the poles (and an Earthwalk with my old colleague Eric Muller of the Exploratorium), another one on ancient polar mammals, and the most recent (my favorite so far) on birds of the poles and how to use birdwatching to do real science.  These are all pretty short, 10-15 minutes. Here’s a direct link to the birds episode. I enjoyed this one in particular because I got to play so much with ambient sound and creating soundscapes, and my friend Tom has the *cutest* 10-year old neighbor who can deliver a script like nobody’s business.  Fun, fun storytelling.  And Jennifer Fee is awesome.  (And she’d read sciencegeekgirl before I called her up for the piece!)

To find out more and listen to the Birds episode, go here!

To go to the iTunes U site with all NSDL podcasts go here.

To see all my podcast series, go here.

Here’s my latest Science Teaching Tips podcast — As any teacher knows, the ability to ask good questions — and use students’ questions — is a valuable skill to have in your teaching toolbelt. In this podcast, TI staff biologist Karen Kalumuck describes how she tries not to answer every question that’s asked during a class, however tempting it may be. Instead, she’s learned how to guide her students to discover ideas for themselves.

Episode 66: That’s a good question!

Karen Kalumuck’s Web site