Anna

Working with students on long term projects I find it's hard sometimes to assess the final project, because as a teacher I'm helping students along the way.  Students who struggle will receive support along the way to make sure they are moving on the right path, whereas other students won't need as much support.  At the end sometimes it's hard to look at the project  and assess just it because I know how much assistance each student needed or didn't need.  I think on my rubric my number scale will incorporate the amount of teacher assistance needed to be successful.  That way at the end hopefully most students will have met most of the requirements of the report, but I will be able to mark on the rubric if the student was able to produce the results with or without assistance.

I immediately thought about iNaturalist because data is available to anyone online.  If you log in you can contribute data, but anyone can see data.  Within iNaturalist are different 'projects'.  Some projects are centered on specific kinds of animals in a certain area.  My students and I might look at the biodiversity within a specific sub group in our state.  For instance, we could look at the amount of different kinds of amphibians found in Missouri, as well as be able to make a pie chart of the percentages of the kinds found out of the total.

I like iNaturalist in my everyday life, too, but I agree that there are difficulties to using it.  Seek and iNaturalist both sometimes have trouble identifying things that have pretty clear pictures, and kids aren't going to get the best pictures, even with training on it.  We're one-to-one with students iPads, however, the iPads won't connect to the internet outside of our school building.  They can take pictures and upload them in the building, but it's not quite as easy as it would be to do it all at once, and it might interrupt some of the kids' enthusiasm.

I liked the progression of questions they showed, as well!  I feel like in school kids are used to closed questions where there is one right answer.  Getting them used to having questions they don't know the answer to is a big step!

I think the first thing I can do is voice my own noticings and wonderings.  Students need to hear this modeled to know what it might sound like and know it's ok, and beneficial to not always know the answers.  I love the lemon lesson idea, because it got at the heart of making very close observations, not general ones.  It's hard sometimes to get students to move past sweeping observations at first.  I also feel like taking students outside and having them write down observations is a good way to spark wonderings.  As they notice more and more it's likely that they wonder more and more about what they observe.  If they're having trouble making the jump to wonderings I can take their observations and voice some things it makes me wonder about.

The most impactful thing about creating my sound map was sitting still with my eyes closed, and honestly not bringing anything outside me except for my pen and notebook.  We so rarely sit and 'don't do anything' for such a long time it's habit for us to fiddle with things and try to distract ourselves.  I would ask students to leave all devices inside and only bring something to write with and something to write on.   I would encourage them to close their eyes for at least part of the time and get past the noises they know are there, to the less obvious ones.

I want to work on positioning youth as people who do science.  I work with a group of kiddos who needs to feel empowered to make changes in the world.  They come from homes where they are often just along for the ride.  By making them feel like experts and teaching them they can make a difference  I hope to get their buy-in.  I want them to see themselves as people whos actions matter and who have important roles to fill.  Instead of them talking about science class I want to understand that they are involved in being scientists.

In my fifth grade classroom we do experiments with evaporation and water vapor.  Generally at the beginning of the lessons we talk about some key vocabulary, students tell me what they know, and I give them the topic of our first experiment.  Typically we do an experiment that shows the water actually leaves the cup and goes out into the air.  This experiment is structured inquiry because I give them the materials and plan to find out what happens to the water when it evaporates.  We use a balance, have a cup on each end with the same amount of water.  One cup has a lid on it, and the other cup has the lid under it so they begin balanced.  By doing the activity in this way students are carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, and engaging in argument from evidence.  To make this activity more inquiry based I could let the students be the guides on how to set up the experiment.  Since they would need scaffolding with this level of inquiry I could lay out a variety of available tools they could use if they wanted.  In groups I could ask students to write or draw an experiment we could do to figure out what happens to water when it evaporates.  From there, I could have groups present their ideas and the class could talk through which design or designs they think might be the most successful at answering the question.  Each group would then pick one of the designs that the class agreed might be most successful.  By doing the activity this way students would also add planning an investigation and effective communication of information to the science practices they would be working on.