Mo Physics Mo Problems

I just got home from an amazing experience at University School of Milwaukee's Spark Conference. I saw some amazing presenters. These are people whose books and blogs I have read and adored. I saw Aaron Hogan , Tara Martin , Michael Matera , Shelly Burgess , and Julie Smith . But looking at the #USMSpark feed , I saw so many people taking selfies with their #EDUHeroes or their PLN. Looking back on the 2 days, I realized that I did no such thing. The main reason is my crippling shyness. I have be working on just come up and say “Hello”to people this year. Now, I actually have to ask if you’d take a picture with me? That would take me way out of my comfort zone. Yes, it is probably something I need to work on. But, I don’t think I’d get the same high I get when I see something else in my Twitter feed. The thing that really gives me the feels is when one of my #EDUHeroes retweets something I said or even better quotes me in a retweet. Think about it, we live in an age where

This week my physics students held our 4th Passion Project Expo. Since we’re on a block schedule we end up holding it twice a year. Students were given the option of following 4 different paths: Experimentation, Learning a new skill, Making something, or Deep research. Here are a few of the projects and products students completed. Experimentation   Learning a new skill Making Something     Check out c-ledge.co Deep Research It was a great way to end the year!

In listening to the Google Teacher Tribe Podcast and reading Kasey Bell’s blog post on the Swiss Army Knife for the classroom that is Google Slides , I was inspired to post some ways that we’ve been using it in class in relation sto passion projects as we close out the year. Before your read this article further, I highly recommend you read Kasey’s post . I tried not to regurgitate too much of her post, but that would be impossible. These examples cover parts of the process of the passion product leading up to our presentation night and documentation in student portfolios made in Google Sites. Pear Deck and Presentations One of the more traditional uses of Google Slides is teacher led presentations. I am no different, I use presentations as a part of my large group instruction in all of my physics classes. But, Pear Deck has allowed me to add more student interaction into those presentations. With the Google Slides add-on for Pear Deck, I don’t h

In the book and movie Ready Player One, users visit a virtuality space called the Oasis to play, work, create, and learn. Although the world of the Oasis was set in the future, there are virtual spaces where students can learn and create in today. In a recent episode of Matt Miller’s Ditch That Textbook Podcast , I was introduced to a new virtual reality tool for the classroom by his guest Mike Drezek . That tool is CoSpaces EDU . It is a great tool for teachers and learners to build interactive 3D environments on their own our collaboratively.  These environments can be viewed on web enabled devices like smartphones, tablets, chromebooks, and desktops. Smartphones can be put into a VR viewer like Google Cardboard to make the environment a fully explorable VR experience. If you head to the Cospace web site and login, you can explore the gallery of user created environments.  If you want to get the VR experience in the gallery, you can download the Cospaced EDU App.

Many educators champion the goal of giving learners more agency over their learning.  I put myself in the category of being on this journey of helping learners own their learning. While reading Kasey Bell’s new book Shake Up Learning , I encountered the following reflection question, “In your classroom, how do grades affect learning?” This question led me to step back and think about student motivation in general. We are a month away from the end of the school year. As students look towards the end of the year, I am looking to keep motivation high by using learning modes that my students find engaging.  So, I put together a survey for them to get some feedback about modes that they found engaging and those that were not. But in the first 3 questions, I asked them some more general questions about motivations in school. The answers I found were quite troubling. This was not designed to be a highly scientific endeavor just a snapshot of my students thoughts. I had student

“How do you react when your students don’t grasp a concept or skill the first time you teach it?” Bell, Kasey. Shake Up Learning: Practical Ideas to Move Learning from Static to Dynamic (Kindle Location 780). Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.. Kindle Edition. If you listen to the talk in educational chats today, you will hear phrases like “fail forward” and “FAIL = First Attempt In Learning”. The general idea is that we don’t expect success the first time we try something. So, we shouldn’t expect students to master a concept or skill the first time they try it. Teachers and students need to be ok with this fact. There is a lot of debate in my school around applying this idea to summative assessments, not just formative. I have a very strong opinion on this topic, but this is not the post for that. (But, I imagine you may already know where I stand on telling a student it’s time to stop learning.)   For the sake of this post, let’s look at pre-summative assessment learning. If