Thursday, April 9, 2009

"Did You Know?"

I am currently a Curriculum Facilitator, one of the curricular areas I work with is our science department. One of my responsibilities is to facilitate department meeting. I opened our meeting yesterday by showing "Did You Know?" . I followed the video with a few minutes of reflective writing and then some group sharing. I was somewhat nervous about showing this because I did not want the staff to hear an unintended (by me) message that here is just one more thing we are not doing well (we tend to be very hard on ourselves in the science department). The discussion started in a somewhat dangerous direction with one of our senior members worrying about all the change we have pushed for and that has been blocked in the past, all true...but not the direction I was hoping for. I think I was able to focus our discussion in a more positive light (though much concern remains) trying to point out what we can do both now and potentially in the future. I felt good about being able to share some of what I have learned in this course (Teaching and Learning in a Networked Classroom). My goal was to begin to get the staff to see the web as a place where collaboration, sharing and thinking can take place, I think I at least opened the door. Well worth the 30 minutes of a department meeting.
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. JeffApril 11, 2009 at 9:43 PM

    One of my favorite activities I've done with science teachers is instead of having students write out a lab report, have them film the lab and then create a 3-5 minute video for YouTube that teachers others about their experiment. Check out the YouTube videos from Shanghai American School that I helped a teacher with here for ideas. :)

    http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=saschool&view=videos&start=40

    This is Shanghai American School's YouTube account. You can get lost in here with all the content. The link above should take you to the page that has most of the high school science experiments on it from last year. You can even use them to teach with. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lise BofingerApril 12, 2009 at 5:09 PM

    Thanks for the link, I checked some out, I love to hear kids taking so much ownership for their own learning. I hope to have many of seniors post their final rat videos on YouTube this year. The students are training rats as part of an animal behavior unit. The final assessment includes of video of the rat completing a maze or obstacle course along with their successes and challenges with the project.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)