After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content. The point of this post is to take a step back, take in, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them. I don't take many yay me moments. But after 20 years, I think I'll soak this one in.
Over the past year, I have been gradually working to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) into my classroom. Our new Wisconsin State Science Standards were designed with the NGSS in mind. They align very well, so please forgive me if my language focuses on the NGSS in this post. As I design lessons aligned the standards, I am considering to the skills students will be implementing that carry across multiple units. This relates to the Science and Engineering Practices contained in the standards . I am looking at the technology tools that can be used to leverage these practices. While there are 8 different practices and I hope to delve into each one and the technology tools that can help learners in each, this post will only focus on one practice. That practice is Developing and Using Models . As the name indicates, there are two major components to this practice 1) developing models 2) using models. Before looking closer at each one, we need to look at how a model...