Sparking Science Through Technology

Today was the last day of my Science Methods class.  I learned so much throughout the course of this semester about how to teach science to students and also about technology in the classroom.  The fieldwork and projects that we did really helped me to get a better understanding of the inquiry method, which was the main focus of the class.  After taking this class I know feel that I have a better understanding of how to teach science to students and I have some strategies that I could use in my future classroom.  This course made me realize that in order for students to be engaged in learning science it really needs to be hands-on.  Through the use of inquiry learning the students are being able to learn using a hands-on approach. Throughout this course, my colleagues and I created eFolio's which are a collection of all the important work that we did throughout the semester.  Some of the things that are included in my eFolio are my philosophy of t...

While going through this course one of the requirements was to do a practice edTPA practice on our fieldwork experience.  What edTPA is, it is a collection of three different tasks and within those tasks are different subsections.  In each of these subsections, I had to upload different documents based on what I did in my fieldwork.   The first task was on planning and the different materials, assessments, and lesson plans that I used in my fieldwork.  I had to take a picture of all of the materials that I used for each of the lessons that I taught and put them into a document to upload.  For the assessments section, I had to again take pictures of the three different assessments for each lesson and upload them in a document.  It is edTPA formate to put everything in pictures and have very little words.  The next section was putting my lesson plan on a document and putting that up.  The last section was a commentary on my planning f...

For my class, it was a requirement that we complete a science fair project.  For my project, I did keeping your candy cool with the power of evaporation.  This experiment helps explain the process of evaporation in a fun way.  I chose this experiment to gain more knowledge on how evaporation works.  Before I started doing this experiment I knew what evaporation was but I did not know that it could keep the candy from melting, so it was really neat to see how that works.  In one of the articles that I read it talked about how when evaporation is used to cool an object, it is called evaporation cooling and it is one of the greatest phenomena.  One thing that I found interesting from reading the articles is that when we sweat that it is our body trying to cool down.  Our bodies are using evaporation cooling to keep us cool so that we do not overheat and pass out on a hot day.  This was something that I did not know before doing this experiment an...