Category Archives: Student Cafe

Shared Video: TELEs in the STEM classroom

Assignment #2, The Design of TELEs encouraged us to shared our videos.  I produced a guide to PBL that finally gives a more research grounded basis for our STEM program.  Very satisfying!

This video was designed to highly one aspect of the guide:  The Role of Technology in STEM.  I hope it provides concrete examples of how we can use the affordances of technology to transform how we teach.

I’ve enjoyed learning from you all.  It’s been awesome to be in an environment for sharing so many good ideas.  Enjoy the rest of the summer!

Michael

TELE – Grow Plants Grow Inquiry

One part of Assignment 2, Option 2 Design a TELE says to share your artefact, so I thought I would share mine on here: https://etec533.wixsite.com/growplantsgrow

I have created a website on Wix to showcase my grade 3 plant inquiry project. I have designed the project around the T-GEM learning theory, which helped me put the project into 4 steps. Please check it out when you have a few minutes. I would welcome any feedback you may have. Thank you!

Allison

Jasper in Action

I really liked the premise of the Jasper series, in spite of the fact they were a little dated, and so I tried one of them out with my grade 7 class as part of their Kingdom Day Challenge. I searched them out and found a couple of the original videos on youtube, Boone Meadow and the Recycling Challenge. Today we watched Boone Meadow as it ties in with a few things we are doing in class. The students worked in their Kingdom Groups of 5 students in each group. The groups are heterogeneous.

The students were quite engaged in the video and it did not take too long before a few students realized that they should be making notes about the information being given in the video. One student asked if we could replay the first bit so they could make notes about the information and I obliged. Other students soon caught on and started to keep notes also. They seemed to enjoy the characters in the video and appreciated the story line. Once the challenge question was given, the students started to figure it out and soon realized they needed some of the other information they had seen in the video, but had not realized they might need later. The beauty of the video on the Smartboard is they could go back and view the actual frames to find the place in the film for the information they needed. They could move the pointer back and forth as many times as required in order to find the information, and many of the students took advantage of this. The picture below shows a couple of the students checking this out.

All in all, I found the exercise quite rewarding in that the students were engaged and motivated to find the solution to the challenge. There were a few different solutions and I am looking forward to the discussion we will have around them tomorrow.

Anne

An interesting Tweet promoting Religious Literacy

Hi everyone,
I was just “cruising the cafe” (that sounds worse when taken out of context) and I saw Samia’s inspiring post from awhile back. On Twitter recently, J.K. Rowling posted this “free online course” that seemed like a really great way to help us and/or our students understand the differences and similarities between various world religions. The course is out of Harvard… and since Harvard has some “street cred”, it will likely be very good!
Cheers,
Dana

T-GEM and Chemland Readings

Hi Everyone,
If you are having difficulty finding the readings for module B lesson 4 (when you click on the links takes you to the site to pay for the reading) I managed to get them all by cutting and pasting the titles into the UBC library search (once you have logged in using the CWL) and all are available there. That was the only way I could find them in their entirety.
Catherine

Learning with esri using ArcGis and The Living Atlas

Yesterday I took part in the webinar provided by the UBC Faculty of Education provided by esri a map database company using their tool Arcgis and The Living Atlas. While I will admit I found the first half of the session a bit too in-depth for what I would use in the elementary classroom I understand the power of the tool they have created. I did find the second half of the session on the Living Atlas to be totally applicable to my teaching.

The Living Atlas is a dynamic tool that can be used in almost any curriculum area. The material is accurate and in depth and while it is a type of open source program the material is vetted before it is allowed to be part of The Living Atlas site.

Below are some screen shots of the types of maps that are available.

Below is the link to the Living Atlas homepage.

The Living Atlas

If you did not get time to look at the esri or arcgis material last week I hope you take some time to discover it.

Catherine

WISE :”Airbags: Too Fast, Too Furious? (ID 1750)” and wise2 site

Hi was anyone able to find or browse this project? (Airbags: Too Fast, Too Furious?) I kept running into a “project not found” page. Just wondering if I am missing something simple. I tried it with the title, with the title and Id and just the ID.

Also, the website https://wise2.berkeley.edu/ mentioned in Lesson 2 on page 4 I keep getting a site not found error. Anyone able to access this?
Catherine