Multimedia Science Journal

My students have used traditional science notebooks in class for most of the year to write lab reports and to keep track of concepts and notes from experiments.  I decided to try an interactive iPad app for the last unit of study.  Mental note is a note taking application that allows for graph paper or lined paper and also has features like sound recording and the ability to add photos.  I like using the app for students because I have shared devices between three students per device and it has a tagging feature so that students could tag their work and find it easily.  The mental note application as a science notebook allows features past a traditional notebook, although I would love to see that addition of video and also the ability to move pictures once placed in the document.  The students can easily email the mental note to me for feedback purposes and also add it to a Dropbox folder to share with other students.  I will present more in depth on my use of mental note at the Chicago Public Schools iPad Academy.

See the work below for the student lab about solar cell investigations:

Equalize Our Education!

My students have just wrapped up a unit on examining education and the story of equity. They first went back into the past of public education and created a timeline of major equity and equality events in education. They heard for the first time about how schools were set up at a local level, when the Freedmen's Bureau started black schools after slavery ended, when schools were integrated by the Supreme Court and then in the real world with the story of the Little Rock Nine, they moved into the 1970s and learned about Title XI and the Disabilities Act. This lead us into the more present day story of education. I wanted to make the context personal and also continue on our exploration of equity in education. Thanks to my amazing teaching partners our students have explore equity is a variety of formats and context.

The students examined the choices offered by their own school system, Chicago Public Schools. Many did not know the choices they had beyond attending a neighborhood high school, as they all attend a neighborhood elementary school. After determining the many choices and options, they then began to notice not only the difference in type and enrollment requirements but the drastic differences in graduation rates, attendance rates, test scores, demographics and special programs offered by the different schools. There were many comments around the exploration of schools from the amazing special programs from sports to the arts and rigorous advanced placement programs at some the best schools and the disappointment at the limited options offered at some neighborhood and smaller schools. The students worked with partners to create "school profiles" using a keynote slide, researching the statistics and adding a photo of the school.

More important than the technology and great slides they took a look for the first time what their choices and their futures as Chicago Public School students could and would be in a few short years. We had a very revealing conversation about what aspects they "wanted" in a high school, what would be equitable in a high school and many of them came to the realization that only a handful of the high schools in our city offer those to students, and even more worrisome those were the schools that were the most selective and hardest to gain entry into. It seems my students came a conclusion that finding the right school for what they want did not always mean they were able to attend it. Which begs the question of our unit, is this system equitable? Is this providing a fair and free education to all?

One thing I do know is by providing my students access to the information and having them examine it critically I think they see the importance of equity and how far we still need to go to have a better version of it in our local school system. They realize that some of the inequity starts with access to the pertinent information to make an informed decision. They have realized the true impact of education both formal and informal when it comes to their own lives. I am so proud of their work, see it here!


We have a QR map created to share with our community:

Keynotes and Feedback

My students have been hard at work over the last few weeks on a big project around the Harlem Renaissance. One area I have been trying to grow in as a teacher is to have student voices and input in both the work they do, the expected quality, and now into the realm of feedback once the work is underway. So often as teachers we want to give meaningful feedback to all of our students on each piece of work, and for me with over 90 students this can be a daunting task. I also wonder if it's being read and how its being used if I already have given the almighty grade in the book. So I decided to approach this task of giving students feedback by including them in the process.

Another positive aspect technology has given is easier sharing of student work. Often seeing other peoples' work allows us to grow in our own work and imagination. I decided to bring both sharing and feedback to students in my classes as they prepare to share their work with others in the school later in the week.

We began the conversation with what is feedback, what type of feedback is helpful, and what should a person do when they get feedback? We came up with some shared language for feedback so it was phrased respectfully and then we hit the ground running. I was so proud of the feedback that they gave to each other as it was both respectful and constructive. It was some of the exact feedback I would have given to students, and yet some of it was something I had not considered or thought of to give. We also talked about how the person could chose or ignore feedback as he or she saw fit. The student may want to make the changes to capitalization, but may like the way the slide looks without a picture even though someone may have suggested to add one to the slide.

The student getting the feedback now had over ten comments from peers to consider when taking a second look at their presentation, not only feedback but a digital record to go back and re-read after present. It also pushed the rest of the class into the evaluation stage of thinking, all while having access to work of a peer to get ideas to take back to their own presentation, again with a digital record to reference.

A few takeaways from this activity for me are that in days when engagement can a challenge, I had most of my class engaged at a critical thinking stage, I had students sharing ideas, getting feedback on work, and ideas were being shared and saved through the use of ipads.

Here are some samples of the work.

Keynote Feedback from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

Investigation with Imagination

As a science teacher of students are new to a full hour of science each day I  have many obstacles, but I have many advantages as well.   My students' experiences up to this point is reading about science, some small investigations, but this is the first year for many that it is daily and investigation based.  The background knowledge they bring to the classroom is limited, but they bring excitement, wonder and interest each day to the science classroom.  In the season of testing, I am faced with preparing my fourth grade students to test on four years of science content, and I am trying to explore the content they may have missed, or have only read about in the past three years.


I have been working with physical science the last two weeks and on Friday after simulations, discussions and video I was ready to let my students apply their understanding of energy by building a roller coaster out of pipe insulation for the track and a marble as the car.  This is a widely used investigation in the science classroom and I was excited to see the students complete the work.  Many of my students have not experienced a roller coaster or a theme park, yet they approached this task with interest.  The students built the roller coasters with success and could identify the potential and kinetic energy throughout the process.  But I saw more than content being experienced.


As a faithful twitter reader I see many posts about learning, imagination, failure, cooperation, creativity and creating a love of learning in our students.  I witnessed these elements during this time in my classroom.  I know why people are afraid of all of these things: they are chaotic, messy, loud and time consuming.  But they are amazing and exhilarating and worth the mess and noise. It seemed fitting that roller coasters was the theme of the day.


The work of my students during this investigation reminded me of a David Jakes tweeted, "Right now, does education need ideas and imagination more than it needs action?" The roller coaster building started with students deciding what their teams would look like, and what their designs would look like for the roller coaster.  The students had to include a big hill, a small hill and a tunnel.  The rest was up to the team.  The teams designed using a creation app, then built the design the team agreed on, took a picture and then began to test.  What happened next was students failing, but being motivated and working together to adjust the design together to find a solution.  They were engaged and working, and the idea of failure does not seem like a proper label, although the design at first was a failure.  The learning and teaching was done student to student.  The students used the process of test, redesign, test, and celebrated a completed trip on the track.  Multiple times in my classroom students cheered and celebrated together the work they accomplished.  


After the initial success of a track came the imagination, creativity and the challenging work that students created for themselves.  They asked if they could add more track length if they could try more loops, curves or hills.  They tried things I could never have "taught" them, they tried things they imagined or their group created in working as a team.  The final part of the day of building was sharing each others work with a gallery walk.  They were proud to show and explain their design and were celebrated by classmates for their work.  


If nothing else I had a handful of students say to me after the investigation, "I love science" and that desire to learn and explore the subject further is a win for a me as a teacher.  They did not want to quit or clean up or move on to their next class for the day.  The love of learning, exploring and creating is something school and testing time often extinguish in students.  If students can leave my class and want more science and the desire to learn I think I have succeed for that day to take steps towards fostering life long learning.






Roller Coaster Building from Autumn Laidler on Vimeo.

Involving Students in the Quality Conversation

After my last post I meet with some of my fellow ipad teachers Anita Orozco, Holly Mullenix-Stack,  and our ipad jedi, Bruce Ahlborn, and asked them to help me with my debate between quality and creativity.  Holly, as a music teacher, agreed that this conflict of creative freedom with quality standards is something she faces in the music classroom as well, but luckily they all had some ideas to help.  All three had great suggestions that included: having students help decide what is high quality work, creating "stages of quality" for students and then allowing them to review each others work to find examples of each stage and determine the quality of work.

After another PLC meeting we saw a video of a teacher in another context of learning allowing students to work in groups, view others work and give critical feedback and then have another opportunity to work again on the same topic.  I considered all of these inputs and determined that I wanted to have students do meaningful work that included choice of topic, medium and work groups.  We had been studying magnets, circuits and conductors and insulators over the last week so this was the subject I would attempt to have them create a quality product for with the purpose of teaching another student who was out sick about what they learned during class with investigations.

Our first stage was to determine the "stages of quality" for a creation product.  Here is what they determined:

Stage One: Topic is clear, the written and spoken piece is easy to read or hear.

Stage Two:  Topic is clear and has supporting information, the written and spoke work are scripted and clear in message. The presentation has two or more slides or scenes.

State Three:  Topic is clear with supporting information including a clear beginning, middle and end.  The script includes questions, answers and the thinking of the presenter.  The work has been reviewed and revised before shared and published.  The presentation has slides that are multimedia with a variety of pictures, drawings, text, labels, etc.

After this conversation I was very hopeful since the students came up with this criteria and I felt confident they could see how each stage was reached.  The next thing we worked on as a group is determining the objective and topic for the lesson and what was going to be taught.  The students came up with about three objectives for each topic that could be answered.  They also created a list of terms that would need to be explained, used and understood by the viewer for each topic.  Finally, they were able to decide if their work would be done with a partner, group or alone. At this point they went to work on a plan and then started creating!

One trend I can see in the work is they were more likely to speak about the topic as they went and not create a script.  Many took a few takes, but never worked from a written script.  Some still had misconceptions about magnet attract to metal and circuit conductors being iron.  They also often used simplistic language instead of the science vocabulary terms.  For example, discussing a circuit as being closed and working, many students said it was "on" or "off" instead of open and closed.  In the case of magnets the terms attract and repel were used in the investigation, but students would substitute, stick or push apart.

So where does the work leave me?  I think I am looking at this as stage one of the creation process myself.  I need to continue to allow them to work and improve their quality.  My next step is to give them a peer review form and examples of work from across my three classes and see what others are doing.  I am going to give time for them to review digital work (please take some time to view some of the student work) and critique it in a way that applies the standards they create and give feedback to another about what they enjoyed and what they suggest for improvements.  There is indeed some high quality work, some that needs work, but overall I think we are on our way to improving the quality of work.

I would love some ideas from those who took the time to read the post and viewed the work!

What is Quality?

I am struggling with the term "quality work" for my students. I am faced with a few problems in my definition of quality and my acceptance of student work that has mistakes or is not perfect. This question has come to me most recently when working with my students on blogging. As a blogger myself, I know that my post are not all perfect, although I try to put my best writing and work out, I know that it is not perfect and may at times have mistakes. That being said, I also write, edit, revise, reread all at once, while I teach students the stages of the writing process as a paper and pencil process in separate steps: brainstorm, draft, revise, edit and finally digitally publish. Which then leads me to this question: do I need to improve my process, or do I need to allow them a bit more freedom in their own? I had a student say to me last week that he did not need to brainstorm, draft, revise or edit because he has his post "memorized" to which I said he needed to follow the writing process as that was the expectation. Another problem I face is when I ask my students to do this process, they are still making errors with clarity of message, fully developing ideas, and then some mechanics of spelling, capitalization, punctuation. So here I am with students using the writing process and still hitting publish on the blog post with errors or writing in need of more work. I continue to teach the parts of the writing process, model, give samples to do the work of revising and editing, share exemplars, and on and on. But what about the writing they complete now? Do I publish with mistakes and approach it as writing is a process and this is all a part of this student's journey and as they write more this will improve? Do I go over each child's blog and help them make every correction and pick the work apart and with it the joy of blogging? I want to have an end goal in mind, I want to have a definition of quality blogging, but I don't want to create a culture where quality means perfect. I also do not want to make it acceptable to post work that is not quality due to rushing through, not making corrections, not putting effort into revising, etc. These students are "young" writers and many are entering a stage in their education until recently have not done a lot of writing, but they also know the steps to revise and edit and often are completing them with high quality.

How do I find this balance? Having students produce quality writing, but allowing students to have some breathing room and not expecting error-free perfection?

If you would like to see more of their writing or leave them a comment please read the class blog.

Giving Choice with Podcasts in iTunes

I have been trying to find resources to use with students that connect to science, but also allowing them some choice in what they are learning. This is the first year for a full time science class for many, so their curiosity is very diverse. I discovered that students can access itunes through their ipad and download podcasts to their device. To download a podcast the student do not have to log in or use a password. I have found two podcasts with a variety of content choices and are accessible to students at all levels through video and audio.

After they watch or listen to the podcast my plan is for them to summarize their learning and give a review for fellow students. I will post the reviews for others students to read on our class website. Stay tuned.


Two of the podcasts I have discovered so far are Science Friday and EcoGeeks, please leave others you know about in the comments that would be appropriate for upper elementary students.