Two great sites for improving Science literacy

 As a middle school teacher, I want to expose my students to as many science related content as I possibly can. In my head, I envision a classroom where students would come in ready to discuss a topic after having been able to read several pieces. Unfortunately, finding those sources can be time consuming and frustrating. Let's face it, most science articles are not meant for this age group. Even then, my student's have vast differences in reading abilities, so I often end up having to assign different readings just so that we can all discuss a topic somewhat intelligently.

That is where two websites I recently found come in. NEWSELA and BirdBrain Science. Both offer science related articles at different reading levels, with the possibility of taking CCSS aligned quizzes after the reading, and a way for teachers to track student progress.

Bird Brain Science is more textbooky. The science articles are informational in nature, and are presented within specific science topics. Although there is the option to assign readings as "interest", most are not particularly interesting to students. I see and have used it more as a supplement to instruction since I can assign a specific topic (i.e. I used the "Where did I come from?" article from the Genetics unit - to review the concept of heredity).

NEWSELA takes recent scientific articles and adapts them to different reading levels. Although much more interesting to read, the articles themselves do not lend themselves for use as part of my instruction. For example, although it might be nice to read about "Cuban crocodiles losing their identity", unless we are specifically studying the plight of the cuban crocodiles, I still have to scour the site to find articles to broaden the topic. I see this site as an enrichment opportunity or as a way to give my lower readers access to what is going on in the scientific community.

Now, if these two sites had a baby... Just imagine leveled reading for science content and science interest. What about you? Do you prefer one over the other?

Gamifying AdVENTURE

Following up on the leaderboards I created a few days ago, the gamification idea really started to take hold. I am not up to the challenge of gamifing my whole classroom yet, but I started thinking more and more about gamifying a unit of study. After all, we do not play a game forever, we play it until we achieve the goal, and move on to another game.

I went on Edmodo looking for inspiration (thank you Edmodo gamification group), and tinkered with the material I already had to create:

http://mariana68.wix.com/evolutionquest

http://mariana68.wix.com/alienchemistry

Building these was not hard, just very time consuming. Even though I already had most of the materials from previous PBL units, putting everything together in a way that flowed, and that allowed me to keep track of mastery, objectives and content was a tiring endeavor. Feedback from actual students, who will be playing these games starting next week, was crucial in creating engaging, visually appealing quests that followed gaming more or less true to form.

Will I be rewarded with more student engagement and particularly effort towards mastery? That is yet to be seen. However, I did get the all important question "Can we start playing those right now?"


Further reading:

• Farber, Matthew. "Beyond Badges: Why Gamify?" Edutopia. N.p., 11 June 2013. Web. 01 Dec. 2013. <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/beyond-badges-why-gamify-matthew-farber>.

• Miller, Andrew. "Get Your Game On: How to Build Curriculum Units Using the Video Game Model." Edutopia. N.p., 17 Oct. 2011. Web. 01 Dec. 2013. <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/gamification-game-based-learning-unit-andrew-miller>.

Gamification, starting really small

One of the buzzes in education out there is gamification. A simple search of the term yields thousands of results. Gamifing your classroom can offer meaningful experiences to students, in the virtual worlds they already inhabit, but what does this actually mean for the teacher, and my big question, how can I create game-based learning opportunities?

Starting Small

I have one recurring assignment that some of my students put little effort in: the Weekly Blogs. Although I have provided many exemplars, sentence frames, and scaffolds, these students just do a "whatever" job, and, although I religiously post rubrics with pointed feedback, I had never received a  corrected paper, until ...

While reading some Edmodo posts on Gamification, another teacher posted "I am ready to use GoogleDocs for my class Leader Board." This got me thinking, what about just taking the plunge, and without anything fancy just go ahead and create a leader board for blog posts. This is what I came up with:

The Result

A couple of minutes after posting this to my class, I started fielding e-mails and response posts along the lines of,

• "How do I get more points?" 
• "If I go and correct my post of _____, will I get more XP?"
• "I need ___ more points to level up. I just corrected last week's post and added ___ Please, please look at it again."
• "Oh no, I forgot to post on Friday. Here is the link!"

Now, why did I not do this before?

See the full infographic below for more cool ways games can help in schools, plus a timeline of educational games since 1985.

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

"Just reading words"

Several weeks ago, I was doing a close reading activity with my students. We read, highlighted, questioned, circled and all those other wonderful things that tell teachers that the students have interacted with a text, right... WRONG.

As I walked the room redirecting, and conversing with the students, I stumbled upon a student who had a wonderfully color-coded paper. I got excited  and started asking questions. When he could not answer any of them the following conversation ensued:
- Just tell me, what did you read?
     - Words
- What do you mean words?
     - Yeah, you told us to read, and I read the words.
- What did they say?
     - I don't know, they were just words.
- So why did you highlight this sentence?
      - Because I was looking for the vocabulary words, and this sentence had several of them.

No matter how I tried to coax him, as he very simply had put it, he had "just read words". This started me thinking on how many of our students "just read words", and don't actually do the close reading that they need to achieve true literacy, even when we have worked hard at giving them a purpose, developed maps of knowledge, and read across disciplines. The strategies and skills needed need to help us develop that which Grant Wiggins defines as close reading:

"what “close reading” really means in practice is disciplined re-reading of inherently complex and worthy texts."

So now what do I do? How do I encourage my students to do a reading task with actual disciplined re-reading?

I began by searching high and low for something other than the highlighters that just "pretty up the paper" and annotations that do not mean anything.

Diigo: 

I had used it myself, and even wrote a post about it not too long ago. While this works for students that are already adept at annotating on paper, it did very little for my "just reading words" students.

Educreations: 

Works for me as a teacher tool, and for my visual learners as they are able to annotate images and create mini concept lessons. The biggest con for me is that it does require a narration.

Activelylearn: 

The hands down winner for now. On this site, you upload a text (document or the web), and create layers of questions to which you can add other media - plus you can align them to Common Core. Students cannot move on in the text unless they type a response to the question. Once they do, they can also see what other students have responded. Both you and them can add notes to their copies, and comment on the answers. Also, blessing in disguise, they cannot go back and edit their original answer so if they just typed -blah- to get to move on, they cannot revise that. What would make it absolutely awesome (hint to developers) would be the ability to input a series vocabulary words that should be in the answer. Yes, it is a forced interaction, but for me, well worth the time.

Have you run across any other tools?

Further reading on close reading: The Critical Thinking Community