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Searching for Science

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This week I was looking at different search engines for kids to use. Since my school is a one to one campus, our kids always have access to the internet. Some of you may think that is a bad thing, but it's really about teaching them to be responsible on the internet. I looked at several kid-friendly search engines: Kidrex, Wonderopolous, Slime Kids, Kidtopia, and Infotopia. I noticed that many of these search engines don't give a video option like Google does. I tried to look for one more geared towards science but to no avail. It got me thinking about an activity we were doing in a fifth-grade class about force and motion and the scenario talked about a catapult. So, I thought how fun would it be to find a short video showing a pumpkin catapult contest! These search engines that I mentioned above brought up different science experiments and articles to read about catapults. However, I wanted them to see an image or a short video. I ended up really liking Kiddle, which is the k...
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GIFs on GIFs on GIFs

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This week's digital image manipulation project was very interesting!  At first, I thought, oh I can easily photo-shop a picture, I mean I am a selfie taker after all!  Plus, I am an expert at Snapchat and all the snazzy filters! So, my first site to check out was adobe photoshop and it just honestly seemed like too many tools.  Then I ventured toward picmonkey and kept having internet issues, so I looked at pixia, coredraw, and paint tool.  They were fairly easy to navigate.  Then I read further down the list and saw GIFS!  I love gifs, and have used them on my iPhone, but was eager to try and create one.  I decided I would create a gif of the butterfly life cycle to show metamorphosis.  It was very easy to search and save the images.  I decided to use IMGflip.com and it was super easy!  I added the four images I wanted and called it Meta-cool-changes.  Science is fun and easy to engage learners. Using this GIF is a great way to ho...
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Blog Radio...What? This week's assignment was very interesting and challenging at the same time!  I learned so much with Audacity, in fact, I learned that it was not my favorite.  However, I still was engaged enough to spend over an hour just learning to navigate the tools.  I even had a little fun recording my voice and playing it back.  I ended up making a digital storybook and that just blew my mind. I was able to make a quick All About Me book with pictures, add my own text and add my own voice to narrate. Talk about empowering the learner!  I can see students enjoying books that are created for them and also have some fun creating their own books.  You must check out story jumper.com. Here is the link to my All About Me Book: https://www.storyjumper.com/book/index/59426495
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Tech Environment

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Hello Fellow Science Lovers!      This week I have been tasked to check out some technological development environments.  I am actually already familiar with a few such as edpuzzle, smore, and postermywall.  I decided I would make an edpuzzle and create a circuits video showing the difference between a series circuit and a parallel circuit.  The way that it works is you find a video on youtube and you can do a voice over, record your own voice teaching the video and shorten the video as well.  Now, I was familiar with edpuzzle but had never made one and it seemed like it would be great for science.  Well after about 20 minutes I made the video the way I wanted it and created a class and everything.  It ended up not working because I wasn't able to confirm my email.  This frustrated me because I really liked my video.  Anyhow, I ended up finding a cool resource for my science teachers  https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/c...
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So how does one become a saucy science blogger?      Seriously though, science is my love...but I have to say I have a very special spot in my heart for reading too!  I was an elementary teacher for 14 years, so it's just a big part of me!  Currently one of our big pushes at the middle school level is to use RUBIES strategies to help students comprehend test questions.  We want them to have a tool to help them find the answer step by step.  Reading is a big help when answering questions and students have to be able to comprehend what they read.  Incorporating as many reading strategies into science lesson is very beneficial to the student.       So for my tech grad class, I have to conduct a survey and I thought this is a perfect opportunity to ask my teachers how they feel about integrating reading into science.  I have used google forms, plickers, quizziz, quizlet, socrative and kahoot.  So I thou...
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Tips for the Middle School Science Teacher

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Hello World! This is an amateur's take on blogging for educators, science educators at that!  Writing a Blog   I love writing, so I thought this should be fun and pretty easy! So part of my grad class assignment is to research some different blog spots and choose one that I think will work for me. I did my research and oddly enough I found edublog quite difficult to navigate, and I also took some tours on kidblog, blog.com, and Wix and still came back to blogspot.com.  I honestly have never had a blog page before, so this was quite informative and I am always open to learning something new! Thanks for taking a peek!    I hope to provide some cool science tips for middle school science teachers.   For those of you that took time to read my blog, I would really appreciate some feedback or tips on how to improve by leaving a comment.  
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