Inject Life into Science Lessons
Technology and Online Resources for Interesting Science Lessons
Incorporate technology into science lessons to create high-interest lessons with a minimum of fuss.
Students enjoy hands on learning. Unfortunately, educators do not always have the resources to accommodate their students’ desire to build, create, and especially, dissect! The science programs that are used in our schools often are chock full of experiments that can be used with the lessons within the books, but many involve supplies that are not included with the program, or need to be completed in a large time-block, or they just take up room in our classrooms that we do not have. Below are some suggestions for incorporating technology into a science lesson, without having to rely upon extra expensive equipment, or creating a lot of mess in the classroom.
The Schlumberger/Seed website offers many virtual labs that can keep students engaged for a while. Many of these labs are in the form of video-game type activities that have a scientific objective behind them. One, for example, examines the concepts of force and friction by having students play a virtual archery game in which wind speed and bow force can be adjusted. Another lab shows the history of how the Earth looked from 600,000,000 years ago to 200,000,000 years into the future. Students often need a visual to go with what they read or learn. Another website that features experiments and also lesson plans is the OMSI website. Here, educators can direct students to online exhibits featuring such concepts as “Aging” and “Engineering (in which students can build their own paddleboat and others)”.
Dust off the overhead and create some transparencies that allow students opportunities to explore visual representations of the concepts that are being presented. A teacher can easily pull up colorful pictures or diagrams (such as that frog the students want to dissect) from the Internet and print them on a transparency. These transparencies can be written on with the overhead markers and cleaned for future use.
Many classrooms are now equipped with a television and now many have DVD players. If a classroom has a computer, it is possible that DVD’s can be viewed on a computer by a few students at once. The school or public library has a wealth of science DVD’s that can be previewed for relevance by the teacher. One suggestion is to create a question sheet for the students to guide them through the DVD in order to focus them.
