So it started with this little guy yesterday. We were on the beach enjoying spring break and I ran my son back to the house. When I returned to the beach my daughter brought me this. As someone on instagram pointed, what happens when you breed a starfish with a snake. As the day went on, hundreds start washing up on the beach.  They were such unique creatures I took as many pictures and videos as I could. I took this video and posted to Instagram (from there to Twitter and Facebook).

From there I got tweets and replies asking what they were. In the mean time I’m on Google looking for these starfish. I tried Google Goggles, at least 30 different search terms, using every Boolean trick in the book, and I find nothing.

Meteorologist Jason Simpson, who used to be in Birmingham but has since moved to Huntsville, retweeted and posted to his Facebook page asking if anyone knew what they were. A lot were telling him brittle stars. Now it’s been a long time since I took island ecology (I got to take that in the Bahamas for my biology credit, can’t beat that class) but I do remember the difference between brittles and starfish had to do with rows of legs and the eyes at end of legs. But I looked it up just to make sure. When looking it up I came across this blog about starfish. Well all kinds of echinodermata, it’s called EchinoBlog. Looked on the blog for a moment and didn’t see my sea star.

After hours of searching I had to stop and be Mom. This morning I went back to looking. Tried new searches. I kept coming across the EchinoBlog. So I go to the site and see that the author, Christopher Mah, has a Twitter account. Thought I’d take a chance and tweet him the picture. Less than an hour later he sends me this link. The starfish is a banded sea star.

You see I’ve spent my life at the beach, I’ve taken classes about sea life, I teach earth science, and I teach kids how to Google things but I still had no idea. I’m not A starfish expert. I don’t accept not knowing something, I get obsessed with finding answers. But I was overwhelmed by not finding. If someone had tweeted me a question about edtech I’m sure if I didn’t know the answer I could find it quickly. I’m an expert in that field. Just like Christopher Mah is a starfish expert.

Sometimes we send our students out into the world wide web with just a few Google skills (which are so important). We forget that connecting them with experts could start a dialogue and learning can go even deeper. Often we are so afraid of social media we don’t forget the positives that can come with it. They need to learn to look for blogs from experts and use the “contact” section to connect.

Sometimes we need reminders of things we already know and this was a reminder for me.  Below I’ve listed some links I have bookmarked in the past and haven’t thought about looking back up. Use connections and teach kids how to make connections wisely for learning.

Connecting Experts To Your Classroom

Skype in the Classroom

Sparking Student Interest in STEM By Bringing Industry Experts into the Classroom

How To Redefine Your Classroom By Connecting Students

Kindergarten Tweets with Weather Experts

Dear media,
Stop blaming Barbie for girls feeling like they don’t have choices for careers. Apparently we are out news stories. But let me ask, how often do you feature women doing remarkable things in their field? Or have women as your head meteorologist? We can blame schools who give 2 electives “choir for the girls.” We can blame parents. How often do moms come home from work talking about what they did that day? Their successes and failures? If you are a stay-at-home mom do you take your children to see you work with charities and make a difference in your community? Do you take your daughter to the mall more than museums? What do you watch on TV, princesses AND shows about animals? Do you praise their intelligence as much as beauty?  Look at your facebook posts.  I just asked my son what a scientist looked like. He said “a girl or boy in a lab coat.”

Barbie is not a problem. Definitely not the problem. I’m a huge Barbie collector. I have a ’84 Peaches and Cream still in  box. But I also have astronaut, Air Force, and President Barbie. She’s a successful single woman.   She has a new book “I can be a Computer Scientist.” I teach science and tech every day in heels and dresses, just like Barbie. Who cares if I’m girly in pink if I’m smart and successful. I’d wear tiara everyday if I could but I could read the html of this page at same time. My most successful technology students are drop dead gorgeous girls. Who cares if their Legos are pink if they can out build you. Leave Barbie out of this.

Rant done. Going back to breakfast and my favorite Barbie cup.

So my last post was on project based learning. Since then I have received a lot of comments, encouragement (thank you, much needed!), and questions. One of the questions that keep coming up is how hard it to justify moving to PBL and STEM in the days of common core. I find that question funny because PBL is the only way I can think of making sure I meet CCSS (or in my state CCRS, we aren’t a common core state) across the curriculum. If I was just teaching a basic “How to use a computer” type class without using PBL/authentic assessment I wouldn’t be hitting almost every ELA anchor standard and I definitely would not be meeting many of the math standards.

Even more important to me as a science teacher (yeah I still teach one science class a day) with instructional technology degrees are the ISTE Standards for Students and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). I don’t wants to just meet the first ISTE-S in each section, I want to meet all of them. If you look at them, moving from a-d moves up to higher levels of learning. With authentic assessment and PBL, we are meeting those higher ones. Also, I feel like I’m doing a better job hitting the NGSS in my STEM/Tech class than I am in my science class. The NGSS have a lot of focus on “STS,” which stands for “science, technology, and society,” and the interdependence of science, tech, and engineering. I talk about this often, you throw math in there and you really cannot have one without the other. The MakerSpaces movement lines up with these so perfectly, I cannot see how there could be an argument against them. I love how the storyline for the middle school engineering standards state “By the time students reach middle school they should have had numerous experiences in engineering design.” Looks like STEM needs to start earlier than middle level. Also, it doesn’t say “gifted students” (who usually get that experience) it says “students.”  Not science is the last on the list with social studies, that engineering design (as well as other scientific concepts) needs to be experienced.  Ok went on a little side step there. Back to standards.

I’m sure I can say this all day but some examples of standards I have used this year:

ELA Reading Anchors:

• Analyzing texts that address similar themes and topics
• Analyzing point of view
• Summarizing key details
• Cite textual evidence
• Integrate and evaluate similarities using content presented in diverse media formats

ELA Writing Anchors:

• Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of text or topics
• Use tech to produce and publish writing to interact and collaborate with others
• Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation (If that is not inquiry based PBL, I really don’t know what is!)
• Gathering information from digital sources. Assess credibility and accuracy while avoiding plagiarism.
• Writing over long periods of time and shorter time frames (this has probably been the hardest of anything else).

Math Standards:

•  Attend to precision
• Use appropriate tools strategically
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively
• Represent and interpret data
• Analyze decisions and strategies using problem solving concepts
• Solve real world problems involving area, surface area, and volume
• Represent and analyze relationships between dependent and independent varibles
• Develop an understanding of statistics variably
• Summarize and describe distributions
• Use random sampling to draw inferences about a population

Next Generation Science Standards (Middle School):

• Asking questions and defining problems
• Developing and using models
• Analyzing and interpreting data
• Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information
• Engaging in arguments from evidence
• Evaluating and design solutions to determine if something meets criterias
• Constructing explanations (for science) and designing solutions (for engineering)
• And these don’t even get into the specific content standards!

I’m sure there are more, but these are just some. The thing is, CCSS/CCRS/NGSS are more performance based than content based. According to Google performance means “the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function.” There is a product that comes with that action or task. Again, authentic assessment and PBL is not about the content or the finished product but the action, task, or function. It is why we look at the project as a whole, from beginning to end. These standards start from the beginning with the questions and research and end with designs and arguments. The data, evaluating, problem solving, reading, writing, etc, all fall in between. So like I said before, I cannot imagine teaching these new standards without PBL, how is that even an argument?