Brittany Cebada

ID

The Green Room: The Top Five Environmental Stories of 2016

Tue, Jan 10, 2017 2:20 AM
Current Event Ideas!

The Top 5 Environmental Stories of 2015 would be a great current events article to have students looking at in the classroom. This article is informative, easy to read and pretty interesting. I enjoyed that the Dakota Access Pipeline made it on the list! A must read for anyone really! This could be used to get students thinking about a research topic that is relevant to recent environmental happenings within the past year. It provides more links about each topic which could be used in further research by a student.

Editor's Corner: Digital Literacy—Is It Real?

Tue, Jan 10, 2017 1:35 AM
Science and Digital Literacy

Very interesting article that discusses the faults in modern digital literacy and how the pursuit of science in the classroom can be useful for how students search online for information. It brings up an important topic of confirmation bias and discusses the difficulties students are having in distinguishing fact from fiction on the internet. The article describes how 80 % of students in some cases couldn’t tell the difference between advertisements and real news. That is surprising but it makes sense in a time when there is so much information on the internet. To take the authors ideas further on how science and the thinking behind science can be a key to better prepare students, it would be interesting to have students search five or six different credible sites for a scientific question and have them compare the different answers given by each site. This could be an eye opener and keeps students making observations and exploring topics more thoroughly.

Our Zoo to You

Tue, Jan 10, 2017 1:03 AM
Inquiry science with live animals!

The animals are on loan? Critters including geckos, snakes, legless lizards, horned toads, ring neck doves, ferrets, HEDGEHOGS, African brown millipedes, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches! Excuse me for the cuteness overload but wow! What a great idea that enriches the students’ lives and the animals. This article really gets an educator thinking about how they could introduce different animals to the classroom. It also reminds teachers to check with their school districts and different restrictions for animals and the classroom. Not everyone may have this opportunity but reading about it makes me think about different critters I could introduce. I currently have a hedgehog so he’s in for sure. I think it’s really great that classrooms that participate in this get four animals per year in six-week intervals. An opportunity like this could really get a classroom interested in science. I love that the previous teacher and students reports and investigations of the animal are passed to the next class. What a great program Lincoln, Nebraska has going for their schools.