Instead of going straight back to teaching after the holidays, I kicked off the New Year with two presentations at the United Kingdom’s Association for Science Education (ASE) annual conference. The ASE conference is Europe’s largest event for science educators, attracting participants from all over Europe and beyond. Held at the University of Northampton, the conference was a good opportunity to share resources and ideas that I’ve developed over my twenty year teaching career.
My first talk, Using PhET Online Simulations for Student-Centered Learning, focused on how to combine the University of Colorado’s popular physics and chemistry online simulations with inquiry-based labs and follow-up resources to put students at the center of the learning experience. It was inspiring to see how many of the teachers in attendance also use PhET simulations to motivate and engage their students. In preparing for this talk, I was impressed by the amount of research which documents the impact of PhET simulations on student engagement and academic achievement. Online simulations do not replace traditional lab experiments, but they do provide students the opportunity to visualize physical concepts that cannot always be demonstrated in the classroom.
For my second presentation I shared my experiences teaching eighth grade physics in a paperless classroom. Tired of printing so many assignments and losing so much class time passing out and collecting papers, the students and I switched to using the Goodnotes app on our tablets for all our work. This low cost app lets students take handwritten notes in digital notebooks and annotate imported PDF documents such as handouts, worksheets and photos. Students share their notebooks with me so that I can monitor their progress and grade their assignments right in the app.
Now I use my tablet to organize the documents for all of my classes and as a digital whiteboard during lessons. This frees me from always having to stand at the front of the class to write on the whiteboard. I can move about the classroom, check on how my students are doing and anything that I want to point out or write on my tablet will be projected at the front of the room. I’ve also got fewer stacks of student papers piled on my desk!
Connecting with teachers from around Europe at the ASE conference was just the boost I needed before returning to the classroom after the holidays. I hope to do more presentations on using digital lab activities to engage and motivate physics students in the coming year.
Step by Step Science 