During the first part of Covid DL I was able to collaborate with other science teachers in the district to create science lessons. Through this collaboration I learned some new tricks with Google slides. In the past I had used Google slides mostly as a presentation tool for me to present information or for student groups to present information. I learned a great trick from Jenny Ellison with Google slides that I relied on a lot during DL. I would create a small slide deck, about 3-4 slides. In Google classroom I can assign the slidedeck to each student and have it make a copy for them. The first slide would introduce the science hook or phenomena. The next two slides would have more background information, examples, and questions to teach the science concept related to the phenomena. I would use these slides while I am teaching and students can annotate, answer the questions and add in notes as we discuss. The fourth slide is the key slide because this slide is the conclusion slide. The slide would include questions or a graphic organizer like a CER (claim, evidence, reasoning) scaffold and a yellow text box. One of the other science teachers I was working with always used a yellow text box for students to put their thinking in. It was so helpful for my students- the yellow text box was their cue to get writing. This format was also great for me as the grader. I could move right to the 4th slide and grade it. This mini slide deck has become almost an ed-protocol for my classes. They know what to do when they see it. There are a couple of features I especially love about google slides for science. Slides allow you to insert a data table. This is great when we have data from an experiment. Slides are also useful for doing science modeling. Science modeling is how we have students explain what they think is going on during an experiment, especially when some of the components may be invisible. With slides you can add shapes, arrows, labels, and images to basically illustrate your thinking. Here is an example from an assignment we did with air pressure. The nice thing with slides is you can also easily import slides to other decks if you want to show several examples of student work. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to add sound to a slide, but I think it is in the Nadine Gilkison resource from this week's Icare. Another tool that works well in science is Kami. Kami allows you to draw, annotate, add text boxes to google documents, and any pdf. In science there are a lot of opportunities to use the drawing tool when we are making models, food webs, atom models, or labeling scientific drawings. Kids seem to catch on to kami very quickly. I haven’t used this feature yet, but Kami will also read the document to students. My friend Chuck Dresel does a lot of Kami pd and if you want to join his Google class, let me know and I’ll send you his class information. Screencastify has been the third tool that I cannot live without. Because kids do have wifi issues and miss class, I use Screencastify to make the lessons available to them whenever they can get online to watch it. Screencastify allows you to make a little video of your screen as you explain a lesson. If I am doing a demo or lab in class, a quick Screencastify means I don’t have to redo labs but students still get the chance to learn. I can use this to send my class messages or explain a part of a lesson that I’m getting email questions about and post it in my announcements. It is super easy to use. It will automatically save your screencasts to a folder it makes on your drive. You can also upload these to your own youtube channel if you want to use them in slide shows.
1 Comment
Janine Burt
10/13/2020 06:11:08 pm
Hi Betsy, I appreciated your comments about keeping things consistent for your students. I know in the spring with distance learning we struggled to help students access and follow all the instructions for using these tech tools like google slides. I'm going to share your idea about color coding based on the task with my teachers.
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AuthorHello! Welcome to my blog! This will be a fun place to share thoughts about teaching and learning. I am a middle school science teacher at Redwood. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out at home with my family or enjoying nature somewhere in the valley. Archives
March 2021
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