Great website with lesson plans and lots of multimedia covering basic chemistry topics. Though titled "middle school chemistry" much of the material can be referred to or used for basic high school chemistry or even biology (such as the basics on bonding, water molecules, etc).
Agreed. The chapter on the periodic table is worth it just for the animations, let alone the lesson plans and other resources. What a good get, Holly. Kudos to the American Chemical Society for setting it up.
If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring.
This power spending on the children of the economic elite is usually — and rightly — cited as further evidence of the dangers of rising income inequality.
But it may be that the less lavishly educated children lower down the income distribution aren’t the only losers. Being groomed for the winner-take-all economy starting in nursery school turns out to exact a toll on the children at the top, too.
There is a lively debate among politicians and professors about whether the economy is becoming more polarized and about the importance of education. Dismissing the value of a college education is one of the more popular clever-sounding contrarian ideas of the moment. And there are still a few die-hards who play down the social significance of rising income inequality.
When you translate these abstract arguments into the practical choices we make in our personal lives, however, the intellectual disagreements melt away. We are all spending a lot more money to educate our kids, and the richest have stepped up their spending more than everyone else.
spending on children grew over the past four decades and that it became more unequal. “Our findings also show that investment grew more unequal over the study period: parents near the top of the income distribution spent more in real dollars near the end of the 2000s than in the early 1970s, and the gap in spending between rich and poor grew.”
But it turns out that the children being primed for that race to the top from preschool onward aren’t in such great shape, either.
“What we are finding again and again, in upper-middle-class school districts, is the proportion who are struggling are significantly higher than in normative samples,” she said. “Upper-middle-class kids are an at-risk group.”
troubled rich kids. “I was looking for a comparison group for the inner-city kids,” Dr. Luthar told me. “And we happened to find that substance use, depression and anxiety, particularly among the girls, were much higher than among inner-city kids.”
“I Can, Therefore I Must: Fragility in the Upper Middle Class,” and it describes a world in which the opportunities, and therefore the demands, for upper-middle-class children are infinite.
“It is an endless cycle, starting from kindergarten,” Dr. Luthar said. “The difficulty is that you have these enrichment activities. It is almost as if, if you have the opportunity, you must avail yourself of it. The pressure is enormous.”
these parents and children are responding rationally to a hyper-competitive world economy.
“When we talk to youngsters now, when they set goals for themselves, they want to match up to at least what their parents have achieved, and that is harder to do.”
we live in individualistic democracies whose credo is that anyone can be a winner if she tries. But we are also subject to increasingly fierce winner-take-all forces, which means the winners’ circle is ever smaller, and the value of winning is ever higher.
An awareness of the views of those in other countries, an understanding of
how Google ranks the results of a web search, a knowledge of the permanence of
information posted online: These are some of the lessons that every student
should be learning in today’s schools, says education technology consultant Alan
November—but not every middle or high school is teaching these lessons.
The Flat Classroom Project is a global collaborative project that joins together middle and senior high school students.
The Project uses Web 2.0 tools to make communication and interaction between students and teachers from all participating classrooms easier. The topics studied and discussed are real-world scenarios based on 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman.
One of the main goals of the project is to 'flatten' or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working isolated and alone, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. This is done through the Internet using Web 2.0 tools such as Wikispaces and Ning.
I'm interested to see where this conversation goes next. There's some great information and pointers here. Thanks for the blog link, Andy. I'll be keeping up with what you're writing. In just ove...
Save important websites and access them on any computer.
Categorize websites by titles, notes, keyword tags, lists and groups.
Search through bookmarks to quickly find desired information.
Save a screenshot of a website and see how it has changed over time.
Annotate websites with highlighting or virtual "sticky notes."
View any annotations made by others on any website visited.
Share websites with g
Diigo can provide a way to enrich or extend learning about a topic.
Beyond extended student learning, Diigo can be used as a form of professional development.
Research
Teaching students to research is a common standard across all grade levels, elementary, middle school, high school, and beyond. Diigo excels as a research tool:
Students can save relevant websites to lists in their Diigo student accounts. Each saved bookmark captures the URL and a screenshot, and can be searched later.
Students can highlight important information right on the website, using Diigo. Later, when students return to the website, they find the reason they saved the bookmark in the first place.
Students can use virtual sticky notes to summarize the important points of information from the website. This activity will mimic the time-tested procedure of using note cards to summarize and organize research projects.
Students working on similar topics can create and join groups in order to collaborate.
Later, when students need to document their sources, Diigo can be used to recall website URLs for citing sources.
How in the WORLD do I do the social part of it??
This seems useful, but I'm still trying to figure out how to let the kids collaborate on Outliners and then share the Outliners with me easily. I bet there's something huge that I'm missing here...
So many of my middle school students would come and ask, "Is this what you want?" Then, they would get frustrated when I responded, "Well, what do you think? Is that the best answer you can come up with for the question?"
Many students were very uncomfortable with the idea that they would be making the decision about what form their project will take, and continually tried to get a stamp of approval.
Students today are accustomed to instant gratification, and therefore can be overwhelmed by tasks that require time-consuming research.
I'm finding that I am becoming more like the students and wanting that instant gratification as well! We are becoming scanners more than readers.
They do not stop researching and begin another activity because they got distracted; in our experience, they are more likely to spin themselves in circles making no progress for an entire class period because they do not want to go through a cognitive process that will take “forever.”
· When students are given a research prompt by their teacher, students often do not care enough about the topic to really persevere.
Use this strategy to help students become more invested: STRATEGY:
I'm going to show you 30 seconds of this video and I want you to write down 3-4 questions you think this video is going to answer.
Turn and talk to a neighbor to share your questions.
After looking at the video clip, have students determine if their questions were answered and what questions they still need to answer.
THEN, students are invested and have things they WANT to know about the topic.
There are very few things in life that our students have to wait for today
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
Quizlet has become a great teaching tool that I have used for the past few years. I wrote this post a little while ago about easily adding images to Quizlet sets. For younger students, I have found a fun and easy way to use Quizlet flashcards plus a bingo tool for fun and effective review for all topics and subjects. This will even work for middle and high school students.
Holly Barlaam on 21 Mar 11Great website with lesson plans and lots of multimedia covering basic chemistry topics. Though titled "middle school chemistry" much of the material can be referred to or used for basic high school chemistry or even biology (such as the basics on bonding, water molecules, etc).
Christian King on 16 Apr 12Worth a bump, I stumbled upon this gem today. Excellent resource, there is even a free pdf textbook.
Randy Yerrick on 31 Oct 16Middle School Chemistry lessons with worksheets and standards.
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