Curriculum Resource: Online Lessons for Middle School Literacy

When it as hot as it has been in the Southeast lately, reading is a great activity.  If you want to add some educational lessons to your middle schooler's summer reading, the Boston public television station, WGBH, has some useful online lessons to teach literacy schools.  Entitled Inspiring Middle School Literacy, and funded by Walmart, these self-paced digital lessons combine video, interactive exercises, and writing to hone such skills as constructing summaries, distinguishing fact from opinion, categorization, comparing and contrasting items, etc.   They are designed for students in grades 5-8, and  are also arranged by content areas:  English Language Arts, Science and Health Topics, and Social Studies Topics.

Check them out on the WGBH website.

Yenka: 3-D Simulation Software to Create Interactive Models in Science, Math, and Technology

I've been teaching physics this semester, and in my search for resources, I stumbled upon this incredible resource.  Yenka is some very powerful 3-D simulation software that allows you to model all sorts of topics related to science, technology, math, and computer programming.  For example, in the area of physics I'm teaching (light and optics), Yenka has some pre-built virtual labs that allow you or a student to manipulate  concave or convex lenses to see how the light rays travel through them and how near or far from the lens you must be for the picture to be clear and focused.   They also have models for the colours of light (it was developed by a Scottish firm, so the spellings are British rather than American), for fiber optics, for light refraction, microscopes and telescopes, and several others.  But they also have lots of other ones relating to electricity, sound, forces, and other physical concept, plus another whole load of models for chemistry.

Then there is math, which has over 200 models about numbers, geometry, measurements, and statistics.  In the technology section...well, I can't even understand what their description of things you can do mean, but apparently you can "Design and test analogue and digital electronic circuits, convert them to PCB layouts, and program PIC or PICAXE microcontrollers."  Whatever, it sounds like powerful stuff.  Finally, in computing, they have what is supposed to be a simple programming technique for manipulating 3-D animated character using flowcharts (although more sophisticated program require an upgrade to some other software they have).

And the REALLY good news is that all this powerful software is FREE--BUT, only for using at home.  For teachers to use the software at school, they must buy a personal or an institution license.  However, for teachers who want to play with it at home to try out some ideas, or for parents who want to supplement what their children are learning at school, it is fantastic.  Plus, it does say specifically that the free license is available to homeschoolers.  Yippee!

So it really is a wonderful resource for creating all sorts of different simulations and interactive virtual exercises in lots of areas of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education.  To download your FREE at-home license to try it out, visit the Yenka website.

Curriculum Resource: Learning About Hurricanes

So we've got hurricanes on the brain here.  But, as good homeschoolers do, we're just turning it into another learning opportunity!

The favorite thing I've found is an interactive application from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Florida (which should know about these things) called Hurricane Maker.  You can play around with the starting place of the hurricane, the wind shear, and the humidity, and see which combinations peter out before becoming a real storm, and which ones result in a major hurricane.

Do you know where the name "hurricane" comes from?  You can find that out, along with other hurricane trivia, by taking the Sun-Sentinel's Hurricane Quiz.  I happened to get that question right, but only scored 53% overall, so I obviously need to brush up my hurricane knowledge.

The Sun-Sentinel also has a bunch of information on hurricanes, which if I had read before taking the test, instead of afterwards, would have helped boost my score!

MiddleSchoolScience.com has gathered a lot of good resources on hurricanes in its Hurricane Tutorial.  Or they have an entire Hurricane Unit, with lots of PDF handouts and worksheets already created, if you are looking for a more school-like information resource.

Hope these help you and your children and/or students better understand what is going on with Hurricane Irene!

Curriculum Resource: Terminal Velocity Curriculum

The researchers at The Jason Project are working on a new curriculum entitled Terminal Velocity.   While the ultimate goal is to investigate the major forces in our universe, the only unit they have completed so far is A Universe of Motion:  Motion, Velocity, and Momentum.  This section looks at the concepts in the title, particularly through the use of test crash dummies to determine vehicular safety.

While I haven't tried this curriculum myself, because that is not what we are doing in science these days, I have done a number of the other The Jason Project curricula and found them all to be useful.  So if you have a middle school who is interested in cars, racing, crash safety, and the like--or if you are studying velocity and momentum--I would check out this FREE online curriculum

Sweet Search: The Search Engine for Students

Following on the heels of my recent post about social media that included networking sites designed specifically for the middle school and younger set, I thought I should also spread the word about a search engine designed for students.  Sweet Search is a search engine that has been created by educational researchers specifically for use by students.  Sweet Search produces results from only the 35,000 websites that have been personally "vetted" or visited and approved by actual humans with educational or research credentials, not search bots.  That means that the results of the students information request will be quantitatively smaller (which is generally good for students learning to access and evaluate information they find over the Internet) but qualitatively better.  Only links to sites with respected and appropriate information will be shown--sites like PBS, the Library of Congress, schools and universities, the Smithsonian and other museums, and the like.

For more details on Sweet Search, including a comparison of a typical search on Sweet Search with some other mainstream search engines, see this blog post on Why Sweet Search Is the Best Search Engine for Students.

Sweet Search is designed for middle schoolers and above.  They have another site, SweetSearch4Me, that is geared towards elementary students.

Lesson Plan: Mendel's Experiments in Genetics

Happy Mendel's Birthday to all!  As Google let us know, it is the 189th birthday of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian scientist who first recorded the patterns of reproduction, famously breeding peas to see what traits were passed onto the next generation, and thus earned the title of Father of Genetics.

Like I've said before, we like to celebrate everything around here, so we had a Gregor Mendel birthday party today.  We invited some friends over and together did an activity based on Mendel's cross-breeding peas experiment.  But since we didn't have the time for new plants to grow, plus peas aren't really that exciting for middle school-aged students, we did a simulated cross-breeding of a much more interesting life form suggested by our recent excursion to see the last Harry Potter movie--we did our simulated gene pool analysis based on breeding dragons!  We used a wonderful lesson plan developed at Vanderbilt and added onto by former middle school teacher Nancy Clark called "Inheritance Patterns in Dragons," which you can download from this page. (But if you aren't into dragons, but are into Harry Potter, there is another site where you can map the genetic path through which Muggles can produce witches and wizards and magical folk can have Squibbs from the National Institute of Health.)

After a general explanation of DNA and genetics, each student chose a set of seven "genes" with different dominant or recessive traits from the same male and female parents.

However, a worksheet helped them figure out what traits would be expressed in each specific offspring (fire breathing vs. no fire, number of toes or spines, color of body, wings, and tale, etc.).  Then each student drew a picture of a dragon with the genetic trails of that pairing.

So, for example, all the dragons (different in style though they might be) had blue bodies--obviously a dominant trait.  Three of the four had red wings and red tails; however, one had yellow wings and a yellow tail.  This demonstrates the fact that the same parents can produce a smaller number (statistically) of offspring with recessive trails, even if the parents themselves don't show those traits.

Anyway, the students really enjoyed it, and seemed to be clear about the basics of genetic inheritance after doing this exercise.

Plus, because it was, after all, a birthday party, I made a dish of Dragon Dip:

This is basically a healthier and vegan version of nachos, with whole wheat tortillas as the skeleton, tomato salsa as the blood, refried bean dip as the muscle, and, in honor of Mendel, peas as the dragon skin (except for the wings, where the skin is made of corn.  It is finished off with a grape tomato for its eye and dried jalapeno peppers as the fire breathing part, heated in the oven until hot, and them consumed with dragon skills (tortilla chips).

There are also some great online resources to use to explore this topic.  BioLogica has two web labs on genetics:  an online dragon genetics simulation, and animations of topics like meiosis along with a pea breeding experiment (like Mendel's) that is based on the fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea.  The Pea Soup website tells Mendel's story, as well as having an interactive simplified simulation of the pea experiment.

This is a fun topic to explore with middle schoolers, especially if you can include some of these more imaginative resources.....and everything goes better with some dragon-based food!

Curriculum Resource: The History of English in Ten Minutes

We seem to be doing even more educational activities than I had planned for the summer.  However, they tend to be the more fun and laid-back investigations of various topics.  One resource that we've stumbled onto recently and have really enjoyed is The History of English in Ten Minutes.

This is a serious of one-minute cartoons on the different ethnic or writing contributions to the English language.  The cartoons are quick and funny, although they don't have a lot of depth.  But they help to depict the wide variety of places that English expressions came from, which helps to explain why spelling can be SO CRAZY!

Don't take my word for it--watch it yourself.  All ten short videos are embedded below.  My son enjoyed them so much that he watched all of them without my even having to ask him to do so.

Does Khan Academy Represent the Future of Education, Part 2

Last month, I wrote a blog post about the free, online Khan Academy and whether or not that represents the future of education.  My friend Maria of Natural Math has just written an interesting post on her blog on Metaphors explaining Khan Academy that encouraged me to think a bit more about this matter.  So this is the metaphor I would offer about Khan Academy:

Forrest Gump taught us that life is like a box of chocolates.  I would say that Khan Academy is like a can of soup.  Education, however, is like a family dinner.

To explain this metaphor, I have to go back, wow, like 20 years ago, when I visited the National Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs (which does the same sort of thing for the Air Force that its more famous cousins in West Point and Annapolis does for the Army and the Navy).  Our guide, who was one of the instructors at the Academy, told me something that really stuck with me.  He claimed that only about 25% of his job as an instructor was to teach the content in his classes.  The vast majority of his job--75%--was to be a role model who exemplified by his character and his behavior what it is to be an exemplary Air Force officer.

And while that ratio may be off compared to traditional schools, given the special nature of those military academies, I think that there are some similar roles for all teachers.  So much of education is all about the kind of person that student is becoming, not the academic subjects at all.  We send children to classes to learn math, indeed, but also to learn to be responsible, to be punctual, to get work done by deadlines, to get along with other people, to continue to struggle with something you don't understand until you do, to work collaboratively, to be creative, to be a problem-solver....tons of things besides math (or science or English or whatever).

So, for example, if it were just about the content, you would think homeschoolers would be all over Khan Academy.  We could set our children up on the computer and tell them to work their way through the videos until they are all done.

But nobody I know homeschools like that.  When people uninformed about homeschooling talk to us, their first question is always, "But what about socialization?"  And it is all we can do not to gaffaw in their face, because at least in an area like the Triangle NC, our kids are the most socialized kids on the planet.  My son had some kind of group learning situation almost every day last year.  He went to Math Clubs and Math Treks, did group nature explorations, participated in an history coop and a large, multi-age and multi-disciplinary coop, had art classes, wrote group stories for the homeschool newspaper, read and discussed over 100 books in several different book clubs, played on a homeschool baseball team, and studied world religions in Sunday School.

If it were just about the content, why would I do that to myself?  The answer is, of course, that what I want for my son's education is so much more than just the academic content of his classes.

So, to return to my can of soup....Khan may be a master teacher (maybe...there are certainly lots of master teachers), and the Internet is a vehicle by which he can can himself (or other master teachers) and make it easily available.  And canned soup is certainly handy to have.  You can get canned soup from Master Chefs--for example, Wolfgang Puck sells canned soup--that probably tastes pretty good and that is pretty healthy (although I don't think it can match the homemade chicken, barley, and vegetable soup that I make weekly for my son's lunch and that takes a minimum of about 30 hours, since I use my friend Laura's recipe for making super-healthy 24 hour bone broth as the base for the soup).

But canned soup does not a family dinner make.  The family dinner is about the other people, and the relationships, and tablecloths and silverware and candlesticks, and the conversations, and all of that, even if the family is eating canned soup for dinner.

So, Maria, there is my analogy.  Khan Academy is like a can of soup.  I might occasionally give my son a can opener and tell him to go heat one up, but I would never confuse it with a meal.

Does Khan Academy Represent the Future of Education?

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about Khan Academy, a FREE online resource of math videos produced by Sal Khan, former hedge fund analyst turned educational visionary.  Khan has turned some math tutorials he produced for his nieces and posted on YouTube into a collection of 2,300 math (with a scattering of other topics) videos that are the foundation of his vision of producing an entire educational curriculum, available free of charge to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Khan (who comes across as a nice guy and not a big ego person) has been a rising star in the media looking for their next educational "Superman" (as in "Waiting for Superman"), now that Michele Rhee's aura has been tarnished with Erasergate and the fact that she and her mentor were kicked out by the voters.  CNN labeled him "Bill Gate's Favorite Teacher," Bloomberg Businessweek called him "a quasi-religions figure in a country desperate for a math Moses," and there is an active online campaign to have him nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The latest on the Khan bandwagon is Steve Pearlstein, the Pulitzer-prize winning business and economics columnist for the Washington Post.  In an article entitled "Mark them tardy to the revolution," Pearlstein posits that Khan's offering will upend all of education, just as Napster disrupted the music industry and Craiglist and the Huffington Post threatened the old models of the newspaper business.

According to Pearlstein, Khan and his ilk--"master teachers"--will produce videos that will be used by thousands or millions of students, reducing the number of people who will need to be employed as teachers.  The video tutorial model, in his view, will also eliminate some of the current bedrocks of the educational system, such as age-specific school levels, school calendars, and grades (Pearlstein writes "As Khan loves to point out, grading will suddenly become simple:  Everyone gets an A in every course, with the only question being how long it takes each student to earn it.")  Given this approach, Pearlstein envisions that within a decade, educational quality will go up as costs go down, learning will become highly individualized, and "look for teaching to be transformed from an art to something much closer to a science."

My first reaction:  I can't wait to see what Valerie Strauss, Pearlstein's Washington Post colleague who writes The Answer Sheet education blog for the website, has to say about these predictions.

My second reaction is this sounds like another great prognostication by someone who doesn't know much about education.  Unfortunately, these days, those seem to be the ones who carry all the weight, since no one seems to care about what people who are actually trained for or work in education have to say.

Now, I'm not saying that some of these ideas might not be good ideas.  But does Mr. Pearlstein really think it will be that easy?  We've long ago abandoned the agrarian lifestyle that first set up our "summers off" educational calendar, but after about a century of resistance to changing that calendar, Pearlstein thinks we're going to talk families out of it within 10 years?  Good luck with that.  Pearlstein thinks we are going to do away with grades and just let everyone work at their own speed until they've mastered the content?  Did he read his own paper's story about the DC-area school that tried eliminating the use of F grades (read my blog post about it here), which lasted ONE WEEK due to vehement public opposition after the Post publicized the policy (read my follow-up post here)?  Again, personally, I agree with the concept--that is certainly what we do as homeschoolers--but I think Pearlstein is WAY underestimating the amount of conservatism there is about education, both among educators and among the public they serve.

My biggest issue, however, is that this is just another example of the "Superman" syndrome--the idea that some one new wonderful person or thing is going to come along and save education--and money as well!  The one thing we know about education is that it is complicated, and diverse, and challenging, and ever changing.  And it will always be those things, because it is a business about developing people, and people are complicated, and diverse, and challenging, and ever changing.

This is not, by any means, a dig at Mr. Khan or Khan Academy.  I like the guy, and I think what he is doing is great.  And it is wonderful that Bill Gates and his son get off on sitting down and watching dozens of Khan's math videos together.  But it is not like that at our house.  My son doesn't enjoy them and doesn't learn that well from them.  He is not a great fan of video instruction in general.  ESPECIALLY for math, videos don't have the interaction he needs to keep from zoning out.  So when we have been working on a math concept that I've been doing a bad job of explaining, and so he understands why he is watching and is interested in having something he is trying to understand made clearer, he might watch and learn from these videos.  But in general, this is not the solution for him.

I'm dubious of the argument that having everyone watch Khan Academy vidoes--but at their own pace--constitutes "highly individualized learning."  I do think technology does present an option for creating lots of individualized modules on all sorts of topics.  But for education to work for everyone, there have to be lots of different types of modules--videos, podcasts, computer programs, simulations, role playing games, virtual reality plays, I don't know, but tons of different types of approaches for the tons of different types of minds.  And who is going to match all these great resources with these diverse minds?  I don't think our computers are sophisticated enough for that yet.  It's still going to take people---people who are not only familiar with all these resources, but who understand education and understand minds and understand children and their needs and behaviors.

In short, I don't see education having fewer staff and lower operating costs anytime soon--certainly not within 10 years.  But, then, what do I know?  Since I have both a Masters in Education AND over 20 years experience working in education, obviously no one wants to listen to my opinion.

Curriculum Resource: Khan Academy

Only a few more days until Monday's webinar with Blockhead author Joseph D'Agnese talking about using his picture book on Fibonacci for teaching math.  (If you missed it earlier, see this post with more details about the webinar and how to participate, or this post about how to win a free copy of the book.)  But is you are looking for an even more multimedia approach to math instruction, along with a wider range of topics, a great place to look is Khan Academy.

Khan Academy has a library of 2,100 different educational videos on a range of middle school through college topics, but focused heavily on science and especially math.  Just the math subjects offered are extensive--Basic or Developmental Math, Geometry, Pre-Algebra, Algebra, Trigonometry, Differential Equations, Calculus.  (In contrast, the History section covers the French Revolution and Napoleon, and that's about it....for now, at least.)  So if there is a math topic that your student could use some help with, it's likely that Khan Academy has a video on it.

And the great thing about Khan Academy is that they are giving it all away for free.  Sal Khan is a man with a vision--to make education freely available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.  Although he now is getting funding from the Gates Foundation, he started by creating hundreds of video on his own and just making them available via the web.  Khan is committed to keep churning out videos until he has the entire curriculum covered.  So he's going to be busy for quite a while...

In addition to the videos, he has some interactive exercises and assessments, and a mechanism to allow learning coaches to keep track of their learners' progress through things.  It's a wonderful resource for homeschoolers to take advantage of as is appropriate for their students--and the price is certainly right!

Curriculum Resource: Story-Rich Math Game for Middle Schoolers

Last night I attended a Math 2.0 webinar that I heard about from my friend, Maria D. of Natural Math.  It was about an online math game that was developed by a middle school teacher for his own classes.  Entitled Ko’s Journey, the special thing about this math game is that the math is embedded within a compelling story--the tale of a 12-year-old Native American girl who has been separated from her family and is trying to return to her clan. 

What is so nice about this program, at least in what I’ve seen of it, is that the math isn’t the POINT of the story--getting reconnected to family is.  But doing the math is the means that makes it possible for Ko to reach her family, and in a very real way.  Each morning begins with gathering enough food to survive.  Given how much time is left, Ko’s daily progress is determined by how much weight she is carrying (so, for example, if you gather extra food, you can carry it for tomorrow, but it will slow your progress) and what environment she is traveling through (so traveling through the desert drains more energy than traveling through the forest). Plus, of course, she needs to interpret maps, understand astral navigation, prepare proportional folk remedies for injuries or diseases, and use other applied mathematical concepts.  However, the math is all a means to the desired ends of reaching her family.

I haven’t used this with my son, but I’m impressed by the concept.  The author of the program, Scott Laidlaw, developed and used this with his own middle school students, who improved over 80% in their state math test scores after using the program.  But I think the thing he values more than that (since I believe that, in general, teachers are less enamored with just test scores than politicians and other non-educators) is the change in his students in their feelings towards math.  Before this program,  Laidlaw cites a study that says 84% of middle school students have something negative to say about the subject of math (no specifics about where that statistic came from, but unless you have been blessed enough to be around a math educator as wonderful as Miss Maria or others of the Math 2.0 community, I wouldn’t be surprised by that figure).  However, through playing this game, Laidlaw’s students finally grasped the application of math to real-life situations, and their opinions about the value of math raised significantly (just like their test scores).

Although Laidlaw has concentrated on putting the story first, there are 25 national standard middle school math skills that are needed to navigate through Ko’s Journey.  So while it is not a comprehensive curriculum, it is a supplemental program that should appeal to most middle schoolers, but particularly the right-brained, non-sequential, global and applied thinkers.  And it is particularly geared towards those students who think math is boring and a waste of time!

I really think this is something that I will try with my son.  If I do, I’ll report back about my experience.

For more information about the program, check it out at http://www.kosjourney.com/ .