MSM 291: (Mystery) Science Theater, SAMR and Plagiarize Check This. Bye Doug.
Jokes You Can Use:
A businessman dragged himself home and barely made it to his chair before he dropped exhausted.
His sympathetic wife was right there with a tall cool drink and a comforting word. “My, you look tired,” she said. “You must have had a hard day today. What happened to make you so exhausted?”
“It was terrible,” her husband said. “The computer broke down and all of us had to do our own thinking.”
EVER WONDER
– Why the sun lightens our hair, but darkens our skin?
– Why women can’t put on mascara with their mouth closed?
– Why don’t you ever see the headline “Psychic Wins Lottery”?
– Why is “abbreviated” such a long word?
– Why is it that doctors call what they do “practice”?
– Why is it that to stop Windows, you have to click on “Start”?
– Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons?
– Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?
– Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?
– Why isn’t there mouse-flavored cat food?
– When dog food is new and improved tasting, who tests it?
– Why didn’t Noah swat those two mosquitoes?
– Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?
– You know that indestructible black box that is used on airplanes? Why don’t they make the whole plane out of that stuff?
– Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?
– Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?
– If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
– If flying is so safe, why do they call the airport the terminal?
Did you hear about the elephant who was always left out of things and thus felt irrelephant?
Eileen Award:
- Twitter: Angie Jenny, Christopher Pappas, Aaron Andrew Alford
- Diigo: Sue Highly, Ron King
Advisory:
Advisory Activities:
http://roosevelt.4j.lane.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/great_advisory_ideas.pdf
Pinterest Ideas:
https://www.pinterest.com/bernern1/middle-school-advisory/
Middle School Science Minute
by Dave Bydlowski (k12science or davidbydlowski@mac.com)
Science Theater
I was recently reading the October, 2014 issue of “Science Scope,” a magazine written for middle school science teachers, published by the National Science Teachers Association.
In this issue, I read the article, “Students Modeling Molecule Movement Through Science Theater,” written by David Stroupe and Anna Kramer. In the article, they describe how Science Theater served as an intellectual and instructional anchor for students and for teachers, as they all made sense of observing relationships and interactions between matter and energy.
From the Twitterverse:
Sylvia Duckworth @sylviaduckworth
@jennyluca @joedale @anamariacult Caution: Chrome extensions can slow down your browser. Use Extensity to manage https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extensity/jjmflmamggggndanpgfnpelongoepncg?hl=en … |
Joanna Van Raden @joannavrteaches
Teacher’s week before winter break activity results–>13 hours of sleep! Myth: teachers have an easy job. |
Brad Wilson @dreambition
welcome to the podcast age http://ow.ly/FZSQg more production, more storytelling, more narrative |
Steve Reifman @stevereifman
Looking 4 a set of short, inspirational non-fiction texts that support the Common Core standards? NEW book @ http://tinyurl.com/pox8w3s |
Steven Singer @StevenSinger3
When you require teachers to learn every new unproven education fad, they have no time left to teach |
Katherine Schulten @KSchulten
So good: “Everything You Need To Know About The Dangerous Teen Trend ‘Wodehousing’” http://www.clickhole.com/article/everything-you-need-know-about-dangerous-teen-tren-1138 … |
Lori DiMarco @TCDSB21Csup
Predictions for K-12 Education in 2015 | @Edudemic #tcdsb21c http://www.edudemic.com/predictions-for-k-12-education-in-2015/ … |
Alex Fitzpatrick @AlexJamesFitz
Heh |
#mschat every Thursday at 8:00 pm Eastern Standard Time. And as Troy says, “The Twitter never stops!” |
Strategies:
SAMR
A variety of videos to introduce and explain SAMR.
http://edtech-mi.blogspot.com/search?q=SAMR
Study better
One of the interesting things about the mind is that even though we all have one, we don’t have perfect insight into how to get the best from it.
Karpicke and Roediger asked students to prepare for a test in various ways, and compared their success
On the final exam differences between the groups were dramatic. While dropping items from study didn’t have much of an effect, the people who dropped items from testing performed relatively poorly: they could only remember about 35% of the word pairs, compared to 80% for people who kept testing items after they had learnt them.
dropping items entirely from your revision, which is the advice given by many study guides, is wrong. You can stop studying them if you’ve learnt them, but you should keep testing what you’ve learnt if you want to remember them at the time of the final exam.
the researchers had the neat idea of asking their participants how well they would remember what they had learnt. All groups guessed at about 50%. This was a large overestimate for those who dropped items from test (and an underestimate from those who kept testing learnt items).
But the evidence has a moral for teachers as well: there’s more to testing than finding out what students know – tests can also help us remember.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141202-hack-your-memory-learn-faster
Resources:
Plagiarism Checkers:
- PaperRater – http://paperrater.com/
PaperRater.com is a FREE resource that utilizes Artificial Intelligence to improve writing. We believe that accessibility to quality educational tools is the fundamental component of our mission. We thank our advertisers, users, and socially-minded investors for allowing us to continue improving the quality and scope of our services.
We also offer a premium membership for those who are interested in an ad-free experience and those who would like to submit longer papers in a single submission.
How do you make money off this service?
We are focused primarily on growth at this point (we are a startup), but we offer a premium membership for those interested in more features. Costs are also offset by the ads that you may have noticed on some pages of our site.
What is the maximum length of text that I can submit?
We allow 6 pages at roughly 300 words/page for our free service. We have a premium service at http://premium.PaperRater.com that allows up to 15 pages.
- PlagChecker – http://www.plagtracker.com/
For teachers, PlagTracker.com offers:
A fast, easy method for scanning students’ papers for plagiarism violations
Free plagiarism checking (TurnItIn licensing for colleges and universities is expensive)
Accurate plagiarism scanning against a huge database of millions of published works
We at PlagTracker want our customers to be able to check a great amount of words for FREE, so we give you a limit of 5000 words. However, if you are exceeding that amount, you can always sign up for our Premium account and have unlimited access.
If you have a Premium account, you will be able to upload your .doc or .txt file, and PlagTracker will scan it for you. This service is only available through our Premium subscription.
- DupliChecker – http://www.duplichecker.com/
Q: How does Duplichecker work?
A: Duplichecker analyzes each sentence entered in the text box. The text can be entered either ways; copy-paste your text into the text box, enter the URL of the content destination required to be checked, or upload a text file.
Q: How to use Duplichecker?
A: Using Duplichecker is quite simple, and everyone can use it; registered users (unlimited searches) as well as unregistered users (3 searches per day). A user can enter text by copy-paste method, entering the url, or by uploading a text file. Press the ‘Search’ button below the box to enter text. The results will be displayed immediately.
Q: Is it necessary to register?
A: You can only perform 1 searches per day as an unregistered user. In case, you are a person related to the field of writing or editing, then it is beneficial to register yourself, as a registered user has the privilege to perform 50 searches per day.
PBL
You have to give up your email address to download. The “book” has a few interesting projects. You get access to three “books” K-5, 6-9, and 10-12.
http://hub.globaldigitalcitizen.org/download-pbl-ebook?mc_cid=8727b94086&mc_eid=b72d6a747f
Online Games
The games found on Try Engineering are appropriate for middle school and elementary school use. The games could be good activities for students to try after you have used one of the Try Engineering lesson plans addressing a game topic.
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2014/12/36-online-games-kids-can-play-to-learn.html#.VJXOmsAA
Web Spotlight:
Are you a bad teacher?
I lost it. I actually only dimly recall what happened next. I’m sure I didn’t actually drag him by the collar into the hall, but that’s what I remember. All I know for sure is that a friend of mine who taught several doors down said that she could hear me yelling at him even with her door shut.
All I could think was: I am a terrible teacher. I was ashamed of my loss of control.
Despite everything the books tell you, teaching is above all a deeply messy human endeavor; for all the exhilarating highs, there are terrible days when you feel like a profound failure, and those are the days when you long for a reality check. Am I really a bad teacher? How would I know?
I know, I know: teacher evaluation rubrics are supposed to alleviate this worry, but if like me you don’t believe that the rubric measures what you’re doing, they’re no comfort and can actually be crazy-making when you score low on something you don’t even value, like the robotic re-iteration of a three-part objective, which would send me into a tailspin of that’s insane! and then no, what if I’m insane? and then a dystopic the whole world has gone insane and I’m completely alone because nothing has any meaning any more! a conviction that rarely leads to good teaching.
Take this short quiz and at the end I will tell you if you’re a bad teacher.
https://gatsbyinla.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/are-you-a-bad-teacher/
Random Thoughts . . .
Doug Herlensky leaves AMLE – Thanks for all the affiliate work and good luck on the next part of your career.