Tag: educational reform

Classroom Project, Education, Maker Eduation, Maker Project, Making a Makerspace, Music, This Week In the ClassroomLeave a comment

Making A Makerspace: Top 10 Tools in a Maker’s Classroom (2012)

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This year was a big year in the STEaMworks (STEM focus, art driven, work/project centered: the STEaMworks), my self-styled Maker classroom.  We (and the Math/Sci Team) built a lot of projects: rockets, rocket cars, derby cars, catapults, simple robots, box-making, bench-making, bridge-building, sail-testing, music making, spirographs, pendulums, 3D prototyping, CAD models, Arduino projects, Alice computer programming, Art Cars, shed construction, a digital STEM Fair and more.  I’ve just typed that up and still can’t believe it!  Nine months and so much sweat, math, science, art and tears.  How did we (my co-workers and rock-solid team, my students and my very … Continue reading Making A Makerspace: Top 10 Tools in a Maker’s Classroom (2012)

Education, TechnologyLeave a comment

Weather Stations, Web 2.0 Tools and John Merrow

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This week, my colleague shanghaied one of my chalkboards for a weather station.  While the chalkboard & wind unit may not seem like much,

The hand-held reader really catches a teacher’s eye.

This type of scientific information begs to be utilized in the classroom.  Daily, nay, hourly temperatures can be recorded and used to find the mean temp, daily temp, range…mode, slope, points on a graph, equations for the daily rise in the temperature, regression lines, etc.  Science classes can study weather patterns, climate change or stasis, the water cycle.  A physics classroom can turn wind speed readings into kilowatt-hours.  Those figures can be amended into proposals for the installation of a wind turbine.

Wait…that’s my collegue put that device up there.

An English teacher can illuminate the difference between lab reports, short stories and literary analysis.  The data gathered in science class, analyzed in Math, interpreted and presented in English, can finally be acted upon in Social Studies.  In fact, this little weather station can become the technological center-point of a curriculum which could, theoretically be scaled between schools all over right?  A revolution? Continue reading “Weather Stations, Web 2.0 Tools and John Merrow”