SYNERGY 2013
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
April 16, 2013
You Can’t Be Serious! Why Wasn’t I Informed?
The Challenge of Implementing Afterschool Programs Where
Students Choose to Take Control of the Learning Process
Presenter: Catherine Valentino
Curriculum Advisor, University of Rhode Island
SMILE Afterschool STEM Program
Author-in-Residence, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston
and Hacore Education, Beijing
Thinkalot@aol.com
INTRO: The role of teachers as “the informers” of content and process
knowledge has changed dramatically in the past decade. In order to be
successful in school and in careers in the future, our students must learn how to
take responsibility for informing themselves and each other. Learning is quickly
becoming a collaborative adventure. Nowhere is this more obvious than in high
quality afterschool programs!
MAJOR POINTS
1. Why Wasn’t I Informed? Passive versus active or inquiry-based learning has
become an overwhelming challenge for teachers today. As educators we need to
say “NO!” loudly and clearly when we see children insisting on being “informed”
rather than becoming active participants in their own education.
2. In spite of the miraculous technology at our disposal as 21st century educators,
a successful teacher’s toolbox contains tools that are almost identical to the ones
new teachers were trained to use more than a century ago. These skills are SelfManagement, Information Literacy, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving,
Communication and Oral Presentation. Insist that students acquire and use
them.
3. The most important thing we can give our children is our unwavering
confidence in them and their ability to succeed at almost anything they put their
minds to doing in education. We are their coaches! Let’s win this game and
celebrate their successes!
MY THREE FAVORITE STRATEGIES FOR HELPING STUDENTS TAKE
CONTROL OF THE LEARNING PROCESS!
STRATEGY 1: MODEL IT! As teachers, modeling our own scientific curiosity
and excitement about learning is the key to success in any class, at any grade
level, including college. It is absolutely essential in the informal learning
environments of after-school programs! In STEM programs we need to focus on
the entire student population—both girls and boys—and we need to tap into the
enthusiasm they (and many of us as teachers have) for school sports. STEM
science is a school sport. We can win this championship!
Begin by putting the ball in their court! Find ways to say an emphatic “NO!” when
students expect us to inform them, to give them answers, provide detailed maps
to their futures and to find the questions that they are curious about. Don’t do the
learning for them! You already have your credential. Make them earn theirs.
Video: Women’s Voices from Summer Olympics 2012: Nike Ad You Tube:
I LOVE this video because it speaks straight to the heart of teachers and
students of all ages about striving to be the best at whatever you do regardless of
the obstacles. Nike aired it in the London Summer Olympics. Paste the link below
in your browser to see the video, or search YouTube for Nike Women’s Voices.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ighxU1vYw&feature=em-share_video_user
Activity: A Moment of Science (As Seen on TV) Enlist students’ help in
creating an afterschool environment where science, technology and
scientific discussions and thinking are a natural and informal part of the
class. Reinforce students for being informal “science detectives,” always
on the lookout for applied science that they observe at home, at school, in
sports, at the grocery store, at the movies, in video games, anywhere!
Activity: A Pencil for Your Thoughts How many different technologies
have humans invented in order to communicate with other human beings?
How much do students know about the simplest technologies—example:
How are pencils made?
STRATEGY 2: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF
MANIPULATIVES From the moment humans are born, we learn by holding,
touching, tasting, smelling and manipulating real objects in our environment. In
spite of the obvious attraction of two-dimensional tablet/iPad devices for
students, and their advantages in terms of quickly accessing knowledge,
manipulating real objects is still the first and most important step in learning at
any age.
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STRATEGY 3: FORMALLY AND INFORMALLY ASSESS HOW
INDEPENDENT AND SELF-RELIANT YOUR STUDENTS ARE AS
LEARNERS. Also assess your own skills as an inquiry-based teacher. Ask
yourself “am i a thinking teacher? Does my afterschool program nurture
independent thinking and problem solving?
1. When my students ask unusual or interesting questions, how often do I
ask “What made you think of that?”
2. How often do I encourage children to seek alternative answers to
questions or solutions to problems? Examples: “Is there another way to do
that?” or “If you did it again, how would you do it differently?”
3. Can most of the questions I pose be answered “yes” or “no” or do they
elicit longer, more thoughtful responses?
4. How often do my children relate activities and discussion in preschool with
events and experiences at home?
5. How well do I model how to work with others in activities? How often do I
demonstrate how to listen to the opinions of others?
6. Have I explained my strategies for enhancing thinking to my student’s
families and invite them to share their expertise?
7. How often do I enlist parents’ help in providing students with opportunities
to inform themselves.
ACTIVITY: Oops! How to Clean Up Spilled Milk Oops! Materials: small cup of
water, sponges, paper towels, a mop Project: to test materials to decide the best
ways to clean up things that spill Sample Questions: What kinds of things have you
spilled before? Which spills are hardest to clean up? What things are easiest?
Suppose you spill milk and don’t have a mop. What other ways might you try to
clean it up? How can we test materials to find out which materials and methods work
best?
ACTIVITY: Humpty Goes Bumpty! Materials: hard boiled eggs, food coloring or
non-toxic colored markers, cotton swabs, newspaper, tape Project: In the nursery
rhyme, Humpty Dumpty falls off a wall. Challenge children to design, make and
test a landing pad that will protect Humpty when he falls. Sample Questions: How
will your landing pad protect Humpty? Have children drop Humpty onto their
landing pads from a distance of 3 feet and see how well your landing pad works.
What could you do to improve your design? How can we keep from getting hurt
when we play outside? What signs can we make to remind us to be careful while
playing indoors and outdoors?
Activity: Cornstarch Packing Materials These make great models and for
inventions. You can get them from Staples or a similar store. They are usually
green and biodegradable. Press them onto a damp sponge and they will stick to
each other and to paper plates, cardboard, etc. These are great building
structures, as well.
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CATHY’S MATERIALS AND RESOURCES
LED Star Pins are from flashingblinkylights.com at about 1.25 each in sets of 25.
Pocket Sound Blasters: Item # SNG-600 at $2.95, Set of 6: Item # SNG-610 for
$14.95; Plastic 2 Liter Bottle Preforms with Caps, Crick-ettes; Aerogel (99.8%
air) Shark and Goldfish Air Swimmer; Colored Flame Birthday Candles;
Sodium Polyacrylate (that’s the Diaper Powder for Cathy’s “intellectual glue”)
and “Boing” bouncing streching tubes All of the above are available from
Educational Innovations (www.teachersource.com) at 1-888-912-7474.
Recycled Newspaper Pencils: Tree-Smart (treesmart.com) is one vendor that
sells to schools.
Twig Pencils are available from Universal Specialties at 1-800-728-5299 (Must buy
at least 36 at .75 cents each.)
US Toy: ustoy.com Metallic Gold and Blue gift bags (available in different sizes
and colors) Plastic Alien figures (4263)
Oriental Trading: Alien Head Character Suckers (5.25 per dozen) In-5/1796; Alien
Paper Hats IN-3/7988 $.3.75/dozen Google these and you will find several other
sources.
littlebits: new electronic building and inventing toy for grades 1 and up available
from littlebits.cc for $89.00 for a Starter Set (Amazon.com carries these.) Extra
pieces such as the fan are sold individually. Amazon will display this if you
search for the starter set.)
Necomimi: Brain-wave Sensing Robotic Ears (I bought this at Charlotte
Children’s Museum—Discovery Place discovereyplace.org) It is expensive—on
Amazon.com the ears are about $69.00.
MISCELLANEOUS REFERENCES MENTIONED IN MY TALK
Sugata Mitra: School in the Clouds (www.TED.com) TED Talk Prize Winner
Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. His
wish is to build a school in the cloud, where children can explore and learn from
one another using on-line resources and collaboration.
Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that children are
able to teach themselves and each other without formal teaching, if they’re
motivated by curiosity and peer interest. In his latest TED talk he outlines his
previous work and presents his latest ideas for revolutionizing education using
the Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE)
Mitch Resnick: TEDX Beacon Street Talk: Let’s Teach Kids to Code
Codeacademy AfterSchool Learning Clubhousees
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Tyler DeWitt: Hey Science Teachers: Make it Fun; TEDxBeacontreet Talk:
February 2013:
Haptics (Ted Talk) Katherine Kuchenbecker: The Technology of Touch
P&P Office Waste Paper Processor (Machine turns newspapers or other wst
paper into pencils.) P&P Office Waste Paper Processor converts paper to pencil,
works on the principle of printer which takes blank paper as input and prints the
desired output. Similarly, this one takes any paper of prescribed size and
produces pencils on the other side. As you can see from the pictures, there is
input slot that takes paper and the pencil exit slot that generates pencils. As in
printers you will need to refill with lead powder or graphite powder to generate
lead pencils. There is a slot for pencil sharpening where you can sharpen the
pencils directly.
Necomimi: Brain-wave Sensing Robotic Ears (I bought this at Charlotte
Children’s Museum—Discovery Place discovereyplace.org)
First Person Report on this device by Boonsri Dickinson:
Boonsri Dickinson is a multimedia journalist who covers science,
technology, and start-ups. She is a contributing editor at CBS
SmartPlanet, and her work has appeared in Wired, New Scientist,
Technology Review, and Discover magazine. E-mail Boonsri. Her
introduction to the robotic ears appears below:
When you see a cat or dog, the wagging tail or arched back can
immediately tip you off to the animal's mood. Can technology make it as
easy to read people? That's the idea behind the Necomimi, a pair of brainwave sensing robotic cat ears made by Japanese company Neurowear.
The fuzzy motorized ears are built atop headset technology created by
San Jose, Calif.-based NeuroSky. It relies on electroencephalography
from a single sensor placed on the forehead to read a person's brain
waves and communicates with a nearby PC or Mac with a wireless USB
plug-in to determine if a person is focused or relaxed. If the wearer is
focused, the attached ears stay erect. When relaxed, the ears face down.
In 2011, Neurowear made a cutesey video of the ears that became a
small hit on the Web, generating 1.6 million views (a lot of people could
probably identify, as the girl in the video checks out an attractive guy, and
her robotic ears move). Neurowear's original intent was to make only one
pair, but after the gimmick attracted so much attention online, the
company decided to produce a line of robotic ears.
My first question, naturally, was, "Do these things work?" I clipped the
NeuroSky MindWave headset to my ear to place the brain-scanning
sensor reader against my forehead. (The earlobe picks up the same
ambient noise as the head, so the ear clip is used for noise cancellation
purposes). In theory, brain states can be detected by measuring patterns
of brain activity. This gadget claims to measure brain waves (alpha waves)
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as an indicator of mood: if a person is concentrating, brain waves will be in
the range of 12 to 30 hertz, NeuroSky reports. If relaxed, brain waves will
measure in the 8- to 12-hertz range.
All About Aurora Star Lights
As explained to Cathy Valentino and students by the owner of the company who
manufacturers and sells the star lights (www.flashingblinkylights.com)
Aurora Star Lights are composed of metal, plastic, batteries, LEDs, and an “IC”
which is an “integrated circuit.” To make the aurora star color-changing light, you
need to create a mold in the shape of the star. Once you have the mold, you can
make the PC Board in the shape of the star. (A PC board is a standard
electronics board that is used in many electronic things. It is where all the wiring
is attached, the IC chip is attached, and the batteries are attached.) A special
factory uses the mold to make the PC board the way the manufacturer wants
it. After we have the PC board in the shape of the star with the wiring and LED
placement ready, we can drop in the actual LEDs. This is done using a
microscope. The LEDs are extremely small. About 10,000 of them can fit in an
area 1 inch x 1 inch. Tweezers are used to take the LED and then attach it to the
wire. Workers can put different colored LEDs in different slots to make a multicolor body magnet light.
After the LEDs are in place, the IC or integrated circuit is installed. This controls
how the light blinks. It tells the lights when, how long and how many times to
blink. Different ICs will make the light give off different blink sequences. The
aurora star has a very unique IC chip that makes the lights increase and
decrease in intensity and stay on at the same time. This effect makes the
function fade in and out of the different LED colors.
Next the battery housing is soldered on to the back of the PC board. This is the
metal tube that holds the 2, CR927 batteries in place. The battery housing goes
over the wiring, so that when the batteries are installed, the wires will deliver
power to the light. On the face side of the body light, hot resin is applied. The
resin is shaped to make a clear cover over the LEDs and the PC board. The
body light is baked so that the resin dries. The batteries are installed and the
cover is screwed on to the battery housing. Once the back of the battery housing
is tightened enough, the light will activate. Once the body light is tested and
working properly, a magnet is placed on the outside. The body light is packaged
and is ready for sale.
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