Science Education

Young Voices on Climate Change

April 11, 2011

Here’s a really cool project, getting young people involved in community action.  I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while.  Lynne Cherry (a well known children’s book author, has produced a series of short films about young people who are taking action about climate change.  Each story is a little different — a [...]

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Phylm – make a film about physics!

March 23, 2011

Phylm /’film/ n. [physics + film] The fourth annual Phylm Prize is now open!  Until May 13, anyone can enter a film — though students are especially encouraged — about physics.  The first year’s winners were a set of students with the Special Relativity Rap.  The second year was Science Made Fun about black holes [...]

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Free webinars on clickers — how to use them and how to teach about them

January 13, 2011

Hey, I just wanted readers to know about my two upcoming webinars on clicker use.  One is on how to teach faculty how to use clickers effectively — basically, some tips on effective professional development.  That’s coming up next Tuesday!  The second is a repeat of an earlier webinar — how to use clickers effectively.  [...]

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Webinar: Writing great (science) clicker questions

November 1, 2010

The kind folks at i>clicker have invited me back to give another webinar on effective use of personal response systems.  This one’s called Writing Great Clicker Questions and will be focused on techniques and tips in writing questions that get students discussing and debating — questions that help students learn, rather than just assessing what [...]

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Science activities for Halloween! (Repost)

October 18, 2010

This is a repost from October 2009. Enjoy! With halloween fast approaching, it’s time to take advantage of a frivolous holiday to do some fun science stuff. No post about Halloween would be complete without a reference to the Grossology site. Scroll down for “lab activities”: This gets high marks from one teacher who says, [...]

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How do teachers organize their stuff?

September 13, 2010

Maybe teachers could have used this post during the summer, when you — theoretically — had some time to pay to organization. Still, I collected this short list of helpful tips from a listserv a while ago, and wanted to share. For example, how do you keep your hands-on activities organized?  .  This link will [...]

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131 Tips for New Teachers

September 9, 2010

One of my newly favorite blogs, Free Technology for Teachers, polled their readers for their tips and advice for new teachers.  The result is a neat little Google presentation, included below.  Some sample tips were: Create an “absent” box for absent students Develop a professional learning community; find a mentor Be consistent and respectful Know [...]

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Teach Physics promotional video

September 6, 2010

I keep meaning to post about this — the PhysTEC project has created a short (5 minute) video on physics teaching as a great career option. They’re suggesting that departments post this on their websites to promote careers in teaching physics. It’s a nicely done little video, and not a bad idea to raise awareness [...]

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Just look down three posts…

September 2, 2010

For all you nice physicists who are hitting the blog because of the shout-out in the AAPT e-NNOUNCER, just scroll down three blog posts to find my listing of all my posts from AAPT. I welcome guest posts about sessions that I didn’t make it to! Just drop me a note at stephanie (at) sciencegeekgirl [...]

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Teacher-tested climate change lessons

August 26, 2010

I was excited to see this recent posting from my institution, CU Boulder. If you’re a teacher looking to teach climate change in the classroom, a group of scientists, science education researchers, and middle and high-school teachers have developed and refined a set of problem-based lessons: Visit them at LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu They say: The result is [...]

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All my posts from AAPT (#aaptsm10)

August 23, 2010

For those of you who wanted them all in one place (and I’m one of those people) here are all the posts that I wrote from the recent Physics Teacher AAPT/PERC physics teacher conferences: Facing Facebook:  Social media in and out of the classroom The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing Classroom Norms Students’ understanding [...]

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The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing classroom norms (#aaptsm10)

August 18, 2010

I’m finally getting a chance to finish my blog posts from the summer meeting of AAPT.  There’s just one more talk that I wanted to share with any of you who couldn’t be there – another delightful presentation from Corinne Manogue of Oregon State University.  Corinne is a colleague, we’ve both been working on creating [...]

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Just listen, dammit! Why faculty don’t – or do -change their teaching.

July 27, 2010

We had a visit from Melissa Dancy today, to discuss her research, with Charles Henderson, on how and why faculty adopt new teaching practices. We’ve put in a lot of magnificent effort, she said, to develop innovative teaching techniques that have proven effects on student learning.  Education researchers get frustrated, trying to tell faculty that [...]

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Education technology posts at AAPT (#aaptsm10)

July 21, 2010

I’ve posted several items about educational technology from AAPT on my other blog, TheActiveClass.  You can see those here: Do students learn better with peer instruction?  Does it last? Common challenges in using clickers Effective use of technology in physics education

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Students’ understanding of energy: Acting out our thinking (#aaptsm10)

July 21, 2010

At the AAPT meeting, the folks from Seattle Pacific University have taken one session by storm, to discuss their thinking and experimentation on students’ idea of energy.  They’re working, in particular, on embodied cognition — learning activities that involve the body to symbolically engage in a scientific problem. Lane Seeley opened out with the claim [...]

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Eyeballs in the Fridge: Why do we love science?

July 10, 2010

I just ran across an interesting new study with the provocative title, “Eyeballs in the Fridge:  Sources of early interest in science”.  Here’s a short review.   You can read the original article here. This was particularly interesting to me because I’m a person with a strong early interest and aptitude for science, but in a [...]

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Summer Science Clubs: Avoiding summer “brain-mush” syndrome for kids

July 4, 2010

This is a post geared more towards parents than teachers because, after all, parents are the ultimate teachers, right?  It’s summer, and kids get to turn their brains off for three months.  Well, mostly.  Connie “The Science Club Mom” shares her experiences on how to do some fun science projects for kids as part of [...]

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Online office hours: Real conversations in virtual spaces

June 22, 2010

Just a little promo fora recent post I wrote at The Active Class on Online Office Hours (thanks to Rhett of DotPhysics for the suggestion).  Here’s a sneak preview: I recently sat in on a series of workshops for newer faculty at the university, and was surprised by a resounding theme among those academics in [...]

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Being smart about studying (#ACPEEP)

June 17, 2010

Students are notoriously un-smart about their study habits.  We know that anecdotally, but we’ve also got some solid data to show how bad they are.  A lot of the problem is that we can fool ourselves into thinking we’ve learned something.  From one of the ACPEEP’s summary documents: Many experiments have shown that repeated study [...]

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We say “pshaw” to learning styles

June 8, 2010

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a very long time, but as any faithful readers might have noted, I’ve been a bit in-absentia for the past several months. I was off busy making some money to support my blogging habit, but I’m happy to report that I’m back, and working on ramping up [...]

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