Sparking Science Through Technology

This past weekend I attended one of the most useful workshops that I have ever gone to.  It was Project Wild, a workshop that focuses on wildlife and how to better teach it in the classroom.  It was all hands-on which I enjoyed because that's how I believe science should be taught.  As I future teacher I am always looking for new ways to implement concepts into my future classroom and this was definitely one of them. The day was full of mini-activities that we could use in our classrooms to help teach our students about wildlife in a fun manner.  We first started the day with an who am I activity which would allow students to guess animals by asking different questions.  Some of the animals were a little more difficult so I would teach about wildlife before playing this game.  Another fun game that we played was Oh, Deer! Some of the students would be deer and the others would be resources such as water, food, and shelter.  All of the ...

With today's technology advancing there are so many new programs coming out that we have never heard of.  Some of these programs can be very beneficial to us as future teachers.  I recently did a project for my Science Methods class and I used a new program that I had never heard of.  I found this program to be very useful and could be useful in a classroom as well.  As a future teacher I think that we need to step away from boring old power points, they don't engage the students anymore.  Students are looking for programs that are exciting, ones that they can record their voice on and play it back to the class.  Where they can add more than just words, but also pictures.  The program that I used was similar to what some of my fellow classmates had used in the way that it could be turned into a movie.  A lot of programs today have voice recording so that students and teachers can record a voice to go along with the pictures, this is also I think h...

A natural disaster struck the state of Texas this past week, that disaster was Hurricane Harvey.  Harvey was labeled as a Category 4 hurricane.  The category of a hurricane is determined by the intense winds that it produces.  Harvey produced 130 mph winds in some places of Texas.  Harvey was soon later labeled a tropical storm because of the mass amounts of rain that it produced.  In some parts of Texas, the rainfall amount was around 50 inches.  People were evacuating their homes before the storm even began.  The stores were running out of water and food, it was truly the worst tropical storm Texas had seen. When a storm like this strikes a state or any nation they rely on the rest of us to help out after the disaster.  There were numerous shelters that were set up where people could go and sleep because their houses had been destroyed.  The American Red Cross also had numerous blood drives and were collecting food and money to go...

September 5, 2017 Today for our class we had a guest speaker, Dr. Michael Edelstein.  He has been teaching for a number of years and is an expert on Climate Change.  Climate Change is something that is affecting us today and we as future teachers are going to need to know how to teach our future students about this topic.  A key word I learned today when learning about climate change was sustainability which is how do we live our life so that other generations can live their lives the same way, in other words, how do we not destroy everything that we have on earth. There are a lot of harmful chemicals in the environment that we do not even know about.  One of these chemicals is found in our local water supply and is not commonly known to a lot of people, the chemical is PFOS.  Harsh chemicals like this get into our water from us using different fossil fuels.  In order to stop putting harsh chemicals into the environment, we shoul...

When I was in science class in elementary school we did not use computers like they do today.  We used chalkboards and paper and pencil.  The only technology that we used was the overhead and the projector.  We rarely ever used the computer, most of the activities that we did were hands on.  In some of the classrooms where I have observed, students are learning science in all different kinds of ways, such as hands on and digitally. Within the first week of class, I realized that we are not teaching to the same kind of students that I once was, we are teaching to digital learners .  There will no longer be paper and pencil tests or assignments in the classrooms, everything is going to be done online.  We are learning to become digital teachers.  We are learning new strategies and techniques that will better help us teach to our students in the future. With the new strategies that we are learning, we will be better able to help and assist our stud...