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Keeping students motivated and engaged in the classroom is essential. Engaging students makes all students want to participate and learn the lesson.  Start the lesson with a bang; you can start the lesson with a fun video about the topic, a video of other students doing the project their going to do, a game, etc. This captures the students attention and makes them look forward to the lesson. Try sharing some cool and interesting facts/stories about the topic. For example, if you are doing an experiment that involves Alker Seltzer tablets and putting them into water to show how high they explode, show a video of rockets or create a classroom discussion if anyone has ever made a rocket and how.

Hi Nicole, Thank you for this post. It is true that engagement is the key if we want our students to learn. There are some topics that can be challenging when thinking of how to engage students. (For example, when students have to learn about rocks. It is hard to think of something on the spot that can get students excited about learning about rocks). However, technology can help us with different ideas and things we can do to help create that engagement. We need to use the resources that are available to us and keep up with the times!

Great idea about the video. I do that now in class. I teach High School and sometimes their focus is on else, other then the topic we are discussing in class. I think using a video to introduce a topic helps set the stage. I also agree there are some topics that are hard to demo or produce in class. A Supernova is one that I can think of, I usually use something from Sci Channel to help explain this. And it doesn't have to be the whole video, you could just use a minute. Whatever works for that topic. I know some good sources of short video can be found on YouTube. There are tons of sources out there like National Geographic, Bill Nye, and NASA these are just some I have used.

Engagement is critical to student's developing a sustained interest in what we teach in our classrooms. With NGSS, phenomena are key. Here is a resource of shared phenomena that you may find useful: https://www.georgiascienceteacher.org/phenomena

Engagement is very important for students while learning, especially in the science class where students may experience confusion with concepts. Being hands- on in the science classroom is always helpful in learning because often times, we have to 'do' the project before we can understand project's concepts. Being someone who has rarely had easy experiences in learning scientific concepts, it has always proven more beneficial to me having done activities and labs and then after understanding what was done in the process, learning about the facts behind experiments. As I am in a course for teaching science, I have also participated in experimenting without having had instruction. Doing activities at first will give students the opportunity to work through and exploring the science and then being taught the concepts allows for a more sound understanding.