My Preproom

As with all learning strategies in class; it's the right tool for the right job. I recently read Practical Work in Science: Misunderstood and Badly Used by Jonathan Osborne. It is a worthwhile read and I highly recommend it. Among some of the ideas that reading Osborne's article sparked in me was the idea of leveraging smartphones for data collection during practical work captured my attention. Being a digi-geek I decided to investigate how this might work and how accurate is the data created. Osborne talks about practical work being used in a science classroom for two reasons: 1) the practical's role in demonstrating a phenomena/ idea/ theory and 2) the opportunity for students to engage in the whole process of experimentation. If the teacher sets aside time for pre-, during-, and post- practical learning then it is a waste of time if a large chunk of that combined time is taken up collecting the data and calculating an answer because there won't be enough time for ...

All science teachers want their students to see the science and the elegance of how the experiment show the science in the experiments done in class.  Not all students see experiment time as an opportunity for learning.  A colleague just tweeted this and it made me think "What DO I do?" and "What should I do?" An internal conversation I do have is... Is this experiment to show a scientific theory? - If yes, then it better blimmin' work every time. I don't want any odd results and I don't want to have to say "Oh - you should have seen …". If this happens, I have lost them and all sorts of misconceptions get reinforced, or created or worse, they might think science is stupid! Will the students see what I need them to see if they do the experiment? Or would it be better to do a Demo or even use an Animation or Video Is this experiment to show the process of doing a scientific investigation? - If yes, then it is better to get some unus...