This groundbreaking interactive guide takes readers behind the scenes of Mission Juno, the first fully solar-powered journey to Jupiter. It’s packed with information about the solar system, the formation and evolution of Jupiter, and NASA’s awe-inspiring mission to explore the giant gas planet. Watch videos about the technology of the spacecraft, listen to fascinating audio clips about planetary protection and other facets of space travel, and explore dozens of informative galleries and glossaries. Destination Jupiter offers a comprehensive and riveting overview of the king of our solar system—the giant gas planet. Here is the link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/destination-jupiter/id1177233734?mt=11
Engagement is a buzzword. What does it mean to you? How do you know your students are engaged? Even with techniques like PBL, how do you assure students are actiavely engaged? From the article: "A 2013 Gallup poll of 500,000 students in grades five through 12 found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students were “engaged” with school, that is, attentive, inquisitive, and generally optimistic. By high school, the number dropped to four in 10. A 2015 follow-up study found that less than a third of 11th-graders felt engaged. When Gallup asked teens in 2004 to select the top three words that describe how they feel in school from a list of 14 adjectives, “bored” was chosen most often, by half the students. “Tired” was second, at 42 percent. Only 2 percent said they were never bored. The evidence suggests that, on a daily basis, the vast majority of teenagers seriously contemplate banging their heads against their desks. Click on title to go to article. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/01/bored-out-their-mindsImage from article
From the site:
We develop interactive resources that utilize technology to create learning environments otherwise difficult to achieve in the classroom setting. Our resources are intended to supplement instruction to engage students in meaningful learning experiences that foster a deep, robust understanding of concepts. To accomplish this, our approach is two-fold: continuously consult the latest research and work closely with in-service teachers. For this reason, development on a resource is never finished. Just as new technologies constantly emerge so does research and standards for best practices. As a result, our team of curriculum specialists, user-interface designers, and software developers iterate and innovate in order to deliver state-of-the-art tools for the modern classroom. All of the resources in SAS Curriculum Pathways are directly aligned with state and national standards. Using the standards database and alignment system provided by Academic Benchmarks, our curriculum specialists employ a three-step process to align our resources:
That's right. SAS Curriculum Pathways is provided to educators, students, and families at no cost. Free... how? Our parent company, SAS Institute Inc., is one of the largest privately held software companies in the world, providing data analytics solutions to industry, government, and education worldwide. Our CEO, Dr. Jim Goodnight, is committed to supporting educators and ensuring that all students have access to educational technology resources that are effective and engaging. https://www.sascurriculumpathways.com/portal/ From the SPIE website:
In an effort to increase awareness of optics and photonics, SPIE distributes educational posters as a service to the community. Requests for five (5) posters or less will be shipped at SPIE's cost; a shipping fee will be applied for quantities greater than five (5). Please send your poster request and mailing address to Ms. Pascale Barnett at [email protected]. Posters are also available for download. Click on the link From the link: SPIE is making this freely available as an ebook. Click here This book aims to provide scientists and engineers, and those interested in scientific issues, with a concise account of how the nature of scientific knowledge evolved from antiquity to a seemingly final form in the Twentieth Century that now strongly limits the knowledge that people would like to gain in the Twenty-first Century. Some might think that such issues are only of interest to specialists in epistemology (the theory of knowledge); however, today’s major scientific and engineering problems—in biology, medicine, environmental science, etc.—involve enormous complexity, and it is precisely this complexity that runs up against the limits of what is scientifically knowable. To understand the issue, one must appreciate the radical break with antiquity that occurred with the birth of modern science in the Seventeenth Century, the problems of knowledge and truth engendered by modern science, and the evolution of scientific thinking through the Twentieth Century. The book concludes by considering the impact of scientific uncertainty on the translation of scientific knowledge into means to alter the course of Nature—that is, the effect of uncertainty in engineering. It proposes a course of action based on integrating existing partial knowledge with limited data to arrive at an optimal operation on some system, where optimality is conditioned on the uncertainty regarding the system. As for a new scientific epistemology in which valid knowledge can be defined, that awaits the bold efforts of fertile minds enriched with the mathematical, scientific, and philosophic education required for such a quest. There is a routine that Penn and Teller do that demonstrates what they call the "Seven Basic Principals of Magic:"
Here is their routine that demonstrates all seven principals: Once you have a good understanding of the seven principals then you have a good understanding of how most, if not all, magic tricks work. I was thinking about this routine as I watched the entertaining 2016 CAST keynote presentation by master magician Jason Latimer. Latimer, uses science as the backbone of his magic routine, but he never strays too far from the seven basic principals of magic in his routines. He has degrees in Math, Economics and Applied Science, dabbles in Psychology and works at the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center with a live show that is designed to get the viewers to think not so much about how the magic tricks are done, but rather to think about asking questions about doing the impossible. Can you do the impossible if you just ask the right questions and get the right answers? Of course you can. (Steve Martin once said that you can be a millionaire, you just need to start with a million dollars.) The trick is getting kids to ask the right questions and to search for the right answers. Find out the trick to that, and you hit the biggest payday in education history. "What happens to the sense of wonder in the age of the internet?" Latimer asks as he works the audience with a Vegas style show full of fog machines and loud music. (Actually, at some points during his presentation, there was so much fog that the audience could not see the trick, such as when he hung a hanger on what appeared to be a beam of light. What should have been a big applause moment was more of a Pavlovian "We will applause because you put your hands up in the air and something must have happened" moment.) That one question, about wonder, could have taken his entire presentation and then some. How do you instill a sense of wonder when all of the answers to all of everything appear to already be on the internet? How do you get students to ask questions when they do not know how to ask? How do you get students to think beyond the text, beyond Google? That is a great question and well worth contemplating. That is a question that teachers have been wondering for years. Like Steve Goodman once asked "How ya gonna keep em down on the farm, now that outer-space has lost its charm?" Sadly, Latimer loses the focus of that question and just skims over it during the show, occasionally reminding audience members that wonder is important, all the while the fog machines blasting away. Latimer's keynote was long on showmanship, and short on answers for the 6000 assembled educators. He essentially took his 12 minute TEDx talk and stretched it out with tricks to about 55 minutes. The tricks were good, some were really good. He started out saying that his gift, if you will, is to ask questions that no one asks. To ponder the imponderable and to ask if what we already know is really correct (Indeed, that is what defines a great scientist: Can we go to moon? Can we make electricity move things? Is the world flat? How fast can light travel? He then did a trick where he asks if water has to stay in liquid form at room temperature. He proceeds to then create a ball of "water" out of, thin air, or water as it were, all the while a poor rube from the audience is left dumbfounded as the magical watery orb pops like a balloon in his hands and goes back into the basin. The implication of Latimer's story and his trick is this: You can find the answers to problems and do the impossible by asking the right questions, or inventing new questions, or re-asking old questions, which is correct. However, by using magic and changing the rules, he doesn't exactly answer impossible questions. What he does, at least with the water shape trick, is as much a linguistic slight-of-hand as anything else. He did NOT make pure water act differently simply by creating some kind of previously unknown conditions. Indeed, I can't remember him actually telling the audience that the substances that he pours into the empty clear basin is really water at all. The audience assumes it is, because he was talking about water prior to the trick. Actually, the liquids are not water at all, but rather a chemical that looks like water and loses its polarity when exposed to air or he slips in polymer balls filled with water (see load, steal and ditch above). What he probably did was apply some knowledge of chemistry to make some substances the LOOKED like water behave unlike water behaves in any situation, unless you happen to be in a zero gravity environment. Simulation. Perhaps if he had the audience member DRINK the water, it might have been a little different. So really, he did not answer the question. He merely manipulated the conditions to suit his needs. And that is not science. It is cheating. The problem with this way of presenting to educators, is that he is not actually answering the questions that he poses, but rather setting up the situation where he can manipulate the situation to suit his needs, to make it APPEAR he is answering the question, which is the opposite of science. Saying "I wonder if I can manipulate the shape of water?" and then doing a trick that neither uses water nor really manipulates the shape of water is mentally cheating which is what magic, I suppose, is all about. This reminds me of how Cap't Kirk overcame the Kobayashi Maru test in Starfleet academy: His didn't beat it by his brains, he beat it by reprogramming the computer so that he would win. Misdirection. Later in the show, he has a trick where the randomly selected card is found inside a box within a box, within a box. How did it get there? Let's just say the stage assistant knows the term "load" from above, and Latimer knows the term "steal" and "misdirection." Latimer has a good show. It is clearly influenced by his heroes in Vegas, with a hint of Copperfield and a little bit of Penn and Teller. And I suppose that for kids, the effect is one of wonder and awe when they leave the presentation. For me however, the show left me a bit empty. How do you instill a sense of wonder in a world for kids where the answers to every question is a click away? Latimer said somewhere in the show that "The questions are more important than the answers." What he meant, I suppose, is that students need to be taught to ask questions because the great changes are made by asking big wonder-filled questions. But adults need to be taught that skill as well. So do teachers. More than one person around me was looking up how he did the trick on their smart phone while he was doing them. They were not trying to figure out how he did the tricks, they were looking for someone that had already figured it out (sort of like I did with the water balls). Even the adults were using Google to quickly answer the questions that they had, during the presentation about how questions cannot always be answered by Google. Latimer also needs to discuss the problem of people asking questions that lead to confusion. "Did ancient aliens breed with prehistoric man?" "Does climate change really exist?" "Is the earth 6000 years old?" "Does evolution actually exist?" One needs to caution teachers about having kids ask those questions that can lead to a lifetime of confusion. Latimer needs to guide teachers on those types of questions as well. The more controversial the question, the harder it is for teachers to address with kids. Latimer said throughout the program that he "Was not here to trick you." He said that four or five times that I can recall. He then immediately followed that statement with something that tricked everyone. He didn't want to trick us. Yes he did. Simulation. Every student needs to read this handbook. Critical thinking skills are being eroded away because we cannot tell what is real form what is fake. Click here to get the Debunking Handbook From the site: The Debunking Handbook, a guide to debunking misinformation, is now freely available to download. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there's no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation. The Handbook explores the surprising fact that debunking myths can sometimes reinforce the myth in peoples' minds. Communicators need to be aware of the various backfire effects and how to avoid them, such as: The Familiarity Backfire Effect The Overkill Backfire Effect The Worldview Backfire Effect It also looks at a key element to successful debunking: providing an alternative explanation. The Handbook is designed to be useful to all communicators who have to deal with misinformation (eg - not just climate myths). The Authors: John Cook is the Climate Change Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He created and runs Skeptical Science and co-authored the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand with environmental scientist Haydn Washington. In 2011, Skeptical Science won the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge. Professor Lewandowsky is an Australian Professorial Fellow and a cognitive scientist at the University of Western Australia. He received a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council in 2011. His research examines people's memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update information in memory. He has published over 120 scholarly articles, chapters, and books, including numerous papers on how people respond to misinformation. (See www.cogsciwa.com for a complete list of scientific publications.) Professor Lewandowsky is an award-winning teacher and was Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition from 2006-2008. His research has been funded continuously since 1990 by public agencies in 5 countries, but he has no commercial interests of any kind. He has also contributed numerous opinion pieces to the global media on issues related to climate change "skepticism" and the coverage of science in the media. A complete list of his public essays can be found athttp://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/inthemedia.htm, which is a blog run by academics from W.A.'s three major universities. Here is an idea that most of you will say"Well I could have thought of that." The difference: These folks actually thought of that. Online science fair organization. The folks at STEM Wizards allow you to completely control your campus science fair online. From entries, to rules, to parent notifications, to judges. Here is a short video: What once was found only in research labs and cost thousands, is now available to high school biology labs for a few hundred.This was a little known, two man business that had an awesome product that I hope takes off for them: A universal smartphone holder that attaches to almost any microscope that allows students to take images through the eyepiece. |
About Tim HoltTim Holt is a 32 year educator that has been the President of the Science Teachers Association of Texas as well as a nationally published blogger n education technology. Check out his blog at http://holtthink.tumblr.com Archives
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