Three new ways to teach Science…with ICT!
With the technology advancements, these are exciting times indeed. And for your high school students to venture past the blackboard and note-taking to experience these three new ideas for teaching science, then it can get even more exciting.
Web Experiments
Web experiments are real experiments facilitated through a computer, with the actual laboratory equipment placed in another location. Maintained by professionals, the concept of remote-controlled laboratories can help students learn more, and motivate them to embark on scientific careers.
Through this, they get a virtual ‘taste’ of expensive, dangerous or complex experiments that cannot be facilitated by local school laboratories.
Moreover, these web experiments are connected to databases, which means that whatever the results are, they will be saved for future use and analysis. Sometimes, when a school keeps on repeating a particular experiment, data points can be gathered to measure the validity of the gathered data. Click here for examples of web experiments.
Collaborative projects
From the word “collaborate,” collaborative projects involve several groups of students, who can be classes from various schools, with a shared topic or project that often involves getting data from different locations.
An example of this project would be the Four Season Project which brought together meteorology, astrology and astronomy by recording the night sky and sunsets in different locations. The project was implemented in complete synchrony with all other participating classes, with communication being done through emails and mobile phones.
Through a collaborative setup, project documentation gets posted on a website, which can be linked to the participating schools’ home pages. A steering group can work out the project logistics, communication, and maintenance of the website.
This kind of project helps students learn about other students’ insights and teaches them how to communicate and work with other students from other cities or countries
Virtual field trips
Teachers are quite familiar with the hurrah of high school students at the prospect of going out of the classroom for a field trip. However, aside from the financial considerations, field trips take a lot of effort to plan and organize.
So why not consider doing a ‘virtual field trip’ instead? And the best thing is, it can be to places your students would never usually get to see, like the insides of a volcano or the marine life under the sea.
Basically, a virtual field trip is a guided and narrated tour of websites which you, the teacher, have pre-selected and arranged based on a theme or subject that students can follow through their computers or a projector screen.
This stimulates learning, and allows students the chance to review a lesson or go at his/her own pace. They are safe and cover more topics than an actual field trip ever could.
There are so many more ICT ideas for teaching science today, like web conferencing or science videos. So research on your own, and come up with lessons that can make your students sit up straight and listen to your subject with growing interest and enthusiasm.
Sources:
“Collaborative projects.” Retrieved November 5, 2008 from
http://www.xplora.org/ww/en/pub/xplora/megalab/collaborative_projects.htm
Samow, Karl. “Web Experiments.” Retrieved November 5, 2008 from
http://www.xplora.org/ww/en/pub/xplora/megalab/web_experiments.htm
“Virtual Field Trip.” Retrieved November 5, 2008 from
http://www.tramline.com/develop.htm
(Published 17 November 2008, Smart Communications, Inc.)
