Journal_8

“Spotlight: Free Science Resources Online” by Dave Nagel (T.H.E. Journal, March 2008)

In this article, Nagel discusses the tools to sharpen students’ skills and entertain as well. MIT’S OpenCourseWare for Secondary Education is as Highlights for High School. This is a very rich resource with 15,000 lecture notes; 1,800 syllabi; 2,6oo videos; audio clips, and animations taken from actual MIT courses; 9,000 assignments; and 900 assessments. In addition, NASA: Online Science and Project-Based Learning not only provides educational resources by grade level, including videos, animations, simulations, educational opportunities and links, but also includes games, trivia, social features, a searchable subject database, job opportunities, profiles, and a picture dictionary for young members. NASA Quest provides grade-based online resources and helps students to do their projects. Besides these, Smithsonian Institution: Standards-Aligned Science Resources is teacher-focused resources, including materials aligned to state and national standards. It can be searched by state (or nation), grade, and subject area through its standard-aligned materials. It also can be searched by subjects, such as air and space, Earth science, general science, art, literature, and language arts.

Questions…
1. How can students find the specific materials to do their projects?
Since there is tons of information available on-line, teachers should provide some basic key words to search from in the beginning. To certain detail level, teachers can let students to freely choose their interest topics. This will avoid the students off the topic too much and spend too much time in a relative broad area. At the same time, the students have some freedom to control their direction and find something they are interested in. This should be a good balance and combination.
2. As educators, how can we implement this on-line tool to our daily classroom?
As teachers, we can broadly browser the topics in some certain subject by grade. We can find something related with what we are teaching in our classroom now. Then we can choose the most related topics and do some further research. Thus, we can decide the key words we should provide to the students, so that they are in the same area. As we move into detail, we can find out that students can choose their interest topics in which level. Teachers should have a big picture before we assign the projects to the students.