My Talk at Tedx Birmingham

Speaking at Tedx Birmingham was an amazing experience! How do you cram 25 years of teaching into 18 minutes? How do you communicate the dire challenges in American education and the hope all around us in excellent innovations? How do you help people outside of education understand how our education system is failing children while at the same time honoring teachers and the impact they have?

The resources I used in the talk should be tagged in my Delicious account with "MyTed". Let me know, please, if anything you need is missing. Also, here's the link to the presentation I used during the talk, which was developed in Prezi.

Tweaking Inquiry

When I was in the classroom, the break around Christmas was always a time when I retooled what was going on in my classroom. It was my half-time for the year, a time to step back and make important changes so that my students would learn better. Half of my time with them was gone, and I wanted the rest of the time with them to be as good as it could be.

If you're new to teaching science by inquiry, you've got a chance to make some key tweaks to teaching and learning in your classroom now. You probably don't need to make huge changes, even if you're frustrated with inquiry. Inquiry is a great approach for teaching! Don't doubt that. Instead, step back and think about small changes that you can make that can give big benefits.

I constantly use the five essential features of inquiry from Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards as my diagnostic for how well I'm doing with guiding learning. Here, I've flipped those around into questions you can use for diagnosing how well inquiry is going in your classroom:

1. How engaged are your students in scientific questions?
2. How do your students give a priority to evidence when they are learning science?
3. How adept are your students at developing explanations based on the evidence they're seeing?
4. How adept are you at guiding your students to consider alternative explanations for the evidence they're seeing?
5. How are your students constantly communicating and justifying their explanations?

I've found that if I think through the five essential features, I can usually figure out what's not working well in the inquiries I'm leading and how I can improve my students learning. 

I'll be tweeting out tips based on each of these questions in the next few days. I hope these help you as you teach with inquiry. Please let me know with a comment here or a reply on twitter if you have any questions. I'm happy to help.

FCR STEM Conference links

Thanks so much to those of you Florida teacher who attended my sessions over the last two days. Here are the links I promised:

• My Prezi on teaching evolution from Saturday.
• For the Facebook page with teaching evolution resources, look to the left here for a link.
• My Prezi on inquiry from Sunday.

Teaching Evolution Resources

A big thanks to all of you who attended my sessions at NSTA in New Orleans. I posted resources from both sessions on the Facebook page for The Missing Link (since I was having trouble with uploading to the NSTA site). If you have any questions, feel free to write them on the wall there or as a comment here. 

See You in New Orleans?

It's almost time for NSTA's Regional Convention in the Big Easy, and I'm getting excited. Please let me know if you're coming so we can connect up. I'll be speaking twice on teaching evolution, and the image here gives the times and locations.

• My Thursday session is workshop-styled, and we'll be focusing on specifics in the classroom. You'll walk away with a lesson plan for teaching whale evolution and an overview of the evolution unit I created in The Missing Link. If you've been to one of my sessions before on teaching evolution to resistant students, this is a good follow up.
• My Friday session is a big picture look at the issues involved in teaching. Do you have students afraid of evolution, maybe even hostile to it? I'll give you some good traction on the issue and show how you can be faithful to the science without attacking any faith-full students in your class. 

Both sessions feature inquiry as the heart of science teaching. 

Backstory of a Tweet

I just tweeted. No big deal really. It was a quote from an Educational Leadership article I was reading. But, in case you weren't aware of how teaching and learning is happening now in today's university, here's the gist of what happened:

• In my online class, I posted an assignment on Blackboard for students to find & read good articles on how schools at changing.
• My students log in and read the assignment.
• They log into our university library and find the e-version of the journal.
• One of my students, B, selects an article on today's tech savy students.
• He reads the PDF of the article.
• He posts a summary of the article and the PDF in Blackboard for his peers in the course.
• I click through all of their posts on my laptop as I grade their article submissions.
• His article catches my eye.
• I don't want to forget to read it; so, I email the PDF to myself as a reminder.
• Later I'm sitting by the fire taking it easy. I'm listening to music on my iPad.
• I see the article in my email and decide to take a look.
• I realize I think I'll want to hang on to the article for future reference, so I open it in iBooks.
• One paragraph catches my eye, and I think about tweeting it out.
• I zoom in on the paragraph with a flick of two fingers, and click with my iPad to screen capture an image of the paragraph.
• I open Twitter, type in my tweet, and attach the paragraph image.
• The good find from one of my students is now out to my 300+ followers, one of which is B from my course.

And, it took me as long to write this post as it did to read the article and post the tweet.

Mirror Inquiry Ideas

I got inspired this week to move an inquiry I've been doing for years onto Prezi. Here's my vlog entry on what I learned in the process, including the following thoughts.

• Here's a link to the Mirror Inquiry on Prezi.
• The original concept for the inquiry came from Video #1 of the Minds of Our Own series.
• Transitioning from a hard copy to Prezi. An image of the old Word file is below.
• Starting to implement web-based video for bursts of instruction. Find all of the videos I researched at my mirror inquiry Delicious tag collection.
• Aha! I could use these videos from my iPad when working with small groups.
• Kids can go back to this Prezi whenever they want.
• Teacher's corners & Facilitator's corners.