This week we needed to check out a lesson from InTime Video. The mission statement of InTime is to help educators improve student learning at all levels and in all content areas. InTime uses contemporary technology, high quality conceptual models, online streaming videos, case studies and probing questions analysis to help educators learn the skills necessary for improving student learning. I sorted through some of their videos and watched videos for a lesson on Newton's Second Law.
Once you click on the lesson the webpage allows you to watch videos on the following topic areas: activity overview, teacher interview, learning, information processing, content standards, democracy, technology, teacher knowledge, teacher behavior. The website also has tabs and information listed to help implement the lesson. I included a brief overview of the videos that I watched for the lesson.
Activity Overview -
The teacher did a review of mass, velocity, force, acceleration and direct/inverse relationships. The teacher used prior knowledge to define each term and how they are related (patterns and connections). The students had active involvement in the lesson. The teacher provided lab materials and general instructions. The students needed to design an experiment that included all of variables so they would be able to construct their own model of Newton's Second law. The last part of the lesson was Reflection. The students reported and examined their data in order to draw conclusions about Newton's Second law and determine the type of relationships (direct/inverse) between mass, force, and acceleration.
Technology -
Instructional software - the students used a Vernier software package (track, carts, photogates, etc.) and the results were recorded with laptop. The students needed to go through some Troubleshooting in order to get the lesson to work. One of the groups of student needed to figure out how to get their photogate to work properly in order to record their data
Teacher behavior -
The teacher displayed proper classroom management by reviewing material (direct/indirect relationships and key vocabulary), monitoring student progress, and asking questions that created higher level thinking
I found this website and the information on the lesson to be very useful. I would much rather watch a video of an actual class trying a lesson than reading about one. The videos actually shows what the students are doing, how it links to content/standards, and the role of the teacher and students. I wish that there were more videos for High School science from this website because I would enjoy watching and them and trying to implement these new ideas. I have just begun to dabble with the vernier probes and after watching this video I hope to try this type of lesson out with my students.
Wow, you got alot more out of the web site than I did. Apparently I didn't even read the mission statement. I viewed the site as a collection of lesson plans within which teachers used technology. One thing that hit me about the lessons was that the "technology" does not have to be the new bells and whistles. Some teachers were using Inspiration or doing a WebQuest, which was just searching using sites that the libraian had set up. So we don't have to get all wild and crazy about the new web 2.0 tools, we can use what we already have and slowly move into the "cloud" tools.
ReplyDeleteHave you been able to implement this lesson in your classroom? If so I'd love to hear about how it turned out. Students typically struggle with Newton's 3rd and I wonder if the same probe-ware could be repurposed to show Newton's 3rd law as it can for Newton's 2nd.
ReplyDelete