All resources in Alex Test Group

City X Project

(View Complete Item Description)

The City X Project is an international educational workshop for 8-12 year-old students that teaches creative problem solving using 3D printing technologies and the design process. This 6-10 hour workshop is designed for 3rd-6th grade classrooms but can be adapted to fit a variety of environments. Read a full overview of the experience here: http://www.cityxproject.com/workshop/

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Diagram/Illustration, Interactive, Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Authors: Brett Schilke, Libby Falck, Matthew Straub

The Optimization of Slime

(View Complete Item Description)

Using their knowledge of the phases of matter, the scientific method, and polymers, student teams work as if they are chemical engineers to optimize the formula for slime. Hired by the fictional company, Slime Productions, students are challenged to modify the chemical composition of the basic formula for slime to maximize its "bounce factor."

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Leslie Stiles

Goodness Gracious! Great Balls of Gluten!

(View Complete Item Description)

This is an activity about a very important ingredient in most baked goods - gluten! Why is gluten so important? Without it, there would be nothing to hold the gas that makes bread rise. Learners will experiment with different types of flour to get a feel for gluten, and discover why using different flours can lead to such different results in the kitchen.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Authors: Don Rathjen, Exploratorium, National Science Foundation, The Exploratorium

Build Your Own Arduino Light Sculpture! Part 1

(View Complete Item Description)

Students create projects that introduce them to Arduino—a small device that can be easily programmed to control and monitor a variety of external devices like LEDs and sensors. First they learn a few simple programming structures and commands to blink LEDs. Then they are given three challenges—to modify an LED blinking rate until it cannot be seen, to replicate a heartbeat pattern and to send Morse code messages. This activity prepares students to create more involved multiple-LED patterns in the Part 2 companion activity.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Brian Huang

Build Your Own Arduino Light Sculpture! Part 2

(View Complete Item Description)

In the companion activity, students experimented with Arduino programming to blink a single LED. During this activity, students build on that experience as they learn about breadboards and how to hook up multiple LEDs and control them individually so that they can complete a variety of challenges to create fun patterns! To conclude, students apply the knowledge they have gained to create LED-based light sculptures.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Brian Huang

Faithfully Feeding Fish

(View Complete Item Description)

Using an Arduino microprocessor, students will build an automated fish food feeder so fish can be fed when no one is at school? This project involves learning how to do simple wiring of an LED, a buzzer, and a servo (motor) to a simple-to-use Arduino microprocessor.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan

Balloons

(View Complete Item Description)

Students follow the steps of the engineering design process as they design and construct balloons for aerial surveillance. After their first attempts to create balloons, they are given the associated Estimating Buoyancy lesson to learn about volume, buoyancy and density to help them iterate more successful balloon designs.Applying their newfound knowledge, the young engineers build and test balloons that fly carrying small flip cameras that capture aerial images of their school. Students use the aerial footage to draw maps and estimate areas.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Authors: Marissa H. Forbes, Mike Soltys

Beautiful Bioswales

(View Complete Item Description)

In this 1-2 week engineering design lesson, students will design and build water filters out of natural materials to simulate a filter system (bioswales) that cleans storm-water runoff before it soaks into the ground or enters a city’s storm-drain system. Their ultimate goal is to determine the combination and sequence of materials that best clean polluted water. Using materials easily found in pet stores and garden centers, students use the scientific method, students design to test and retest their designs and record, display and analyze their results.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Create Your Own Life Straw

(View Complete Item Description)

You are preparing your family’s emergency kits in case there is a need to leave your home quickly, or stay in your home without electricity or water. You need to be able to create an emergency supply kit that includes a lightweight water filtration device that is low cost. This will provide you with clean water regardless of your water source. In this project, you will gain knowledge of natural disaster preparedness through the Red Cross Pillowcase project. You will research and experiment with the water cycle to learn how water is naturally filtered. You will then design and build a water filtration device that could filter water in an emergency situation.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Authors: Amanda Zacharek, Nicola Shaddon

Worm Herding

(View Complete Item Description)

This project will raise student awareness of the problem of waste and waste management in our community. As we progress through the unit the goal is to reduce the amount of waste that our school produces. There are many ways to do this but the most unique aspect is to reduce biodegradable waste from our cafeteria through the process of vermicomposting. Students will design and create worm bins to reduce our cafeteria waste. The project will take a couple of weeks for the content and the construction of worm bins and then we will monitor our worm bins throughout the school year.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study

Leadership Essentials: School Librarians and OER - How will you lead your school? Making the Leap.

(View Complete Item Description)

The School Librarian Program at Granite State College is based on the foundational belief that school librarians are essential, integral and transformational leaders.  The program focuses on preparing school librarians as catalysts for school change and learning for the digital age.  In addition to developing the requisite skill sets and knowledge base needed to perform at top levels, there is a focus on the development of dispositions and attitudes such as initiative, creativity, self-direction, resilience, flexibility and intellectual curiosity which are crucial in assisting learning communities to engage in continuous improvement, innovation and reflective practice.  The program emphasizes the convergence of these dispositions,  skills, knowledge and understandings in order for candidates to achieve and succeed with a strategic plan for schools to ramp up and redesign school library media programs to provide the requisite, robust environment and intentional opportunities for meaningful student engagement with content, ideas, information and technology.This module is intended to be completed over the course of a 12-week semester and is designed to develop understanding about becoming a more effective school library leader within the evolving contexts of the digital age – especially related to the assessment of leadership dispositions and competencies needed to ramp up and redesign school library programs to provide the robust, flexible environments and intentional opportunities for meaningful student and teacher engagement with OER content, ideas, information and technology. The module addresses five areas of focus — preparation (2 weeks), planning (2 weeks), organizational strategy and change (3 weeks), transformational learning (3 weeks) and reflection/synthesis (2 week).

Material Type: Module

Author: Susan Ballard

OER: A Field Guide for Academic Librarians

(View Complete Item Description)

We intend this book to act as a guide writ large for would-be champions of OER, that anyone called to action by the example set by our chapter authors might serve as guides themselves. The following chapters tap into the deep experience of practitioners who represent a meaningful cross section of higher education institutions in North America. It is our hope that the examples and discussions presented by our authors will facilitate connections among practitioners, foster the development of best practices for OER adoption and creation, and more importantly, lay a foundation for novel, educational excellence.

Material Type: Reading

Threshold Concepts: Reenvisioning K-12 Information Literacy Instruction

(View Complete Item Description)

The idea of Threshold Concepts has been widely discussed in higher education for more than a decade. As defined by Jan H.F. Meyer and Ray Land, a threshold concept “can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress”.  (Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2003). Put another way, threshold concepts are the core ideas and principles in any discipline that often become second nature to experts, but may be completely foreign to the novice. And yet, without an understanding of these core concepts, learners cannot progress in further learning in any given subject area. As with all academic disciplines, threshold concepts exist in the area of Information Literacy; grasping information literacy threshold concepts is essential for students to become effective researchers.In 2015, the American Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) replaced their Information Literacy Competency Standards, with a “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education”. The Framework is organized into six Frames, each anchored by an information literacy threshold concept and supported by a set of knowledge practices and dispositions. These six information literacy threshold concepts include:Authority is Constructed and ContextualInformation Creation is a ProcessInformation Has ValueResearch as InquiryScholarship as ConversationSearching as Strategic ExplorationBased on the research studies and experiences of academic instruction librarians who see first-hand the challenges students experience when conducting college-level research, the new Framework was developed to support information literacy instruction in the digital age. The literature suggests that most students entering college are unprepared for the rigors of academic research. (Head, A. J. (2013). If students can gain an understanding of these six threshold concepts, they will likely be better researchers and generally more successful in their academic work.What are the implications of this huge paradigm shift in college-level research instruction for school librarians? Simply put, school librarians have a wonderful opportunity to prepare students for college level research by systematically teaching information literacy threshold concepts in grades K-12. A scaffolded information literacy instruction program focused on threshold concepts along with standards and skills could help pave the way for students to be effective college researchers. With an estimated 30% of US college and university students dropping out after their first year, preparing research savvy students for the demands of college assignments could have a significant impact on student success and ultimately on college graduation rates.  Instructional ObjectivesBy the completion of Module 1, students will be able to identify a threshold concept from their field or discipline and design a learning activity that could be used to teach this concept.By the completion of Module 2, students will be able to identify one or more stumbling blocks that students encounter when conducting academic research, and describe how a better grasp of one of the six ACRL Information Literacy threshold concepts could help overcome this research barrier.By the completion of Module 3, students will be able to create a lesson plan for a K-12 classroom which teaches or reinforces the threshold concept “Research as Inquiry”. 

Material Type: Module

Author: Susan Mikkelsen

Permissions Guide For Educators

(View Complete Item Description)

This guide provides a primer on copyright and use permissions. It is intended to support teachers, librarians, curriculum experts and others in identifying the terms of use for digital resources, so that the resources may be appropriately (and legally) used as part of lessons and instruction. The guide also helps educators and curriculum experts in approaching the task of securing permission to use copyrighted materials in their classrooms, collections, libraries or elsewhere in new ways and with fewer restrictions than fair use potentially offers. The guide was created as part of ISKME's Primary Source Project, and is the result of collaboration with copyright holders, intellectual property experts, and educators.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Admin

Instructional Leadership - Learner variability

(View Complete Item Description)

Knowledge of learners and learning is an essential priority for Library Media Specialists. As the demand for meeting the needs of all learners increases, LMSs are uniquely positioned to observe and support learners across the range of their strengths and challenges. Not only are they able to provide a variety of resources for gathering, processing, and producing information, LMSs are often afforded the opportunity to observe learner strengths that may go overlooked in classroom settings.Personalizing learning is a shift from facilitating implementation of a curricular program to developing a repertoire of instructional resources and strategies to support learner variability. In bridging the disciplines of information and learning, the LMS stays abreast of developments in each, curating and accessing exceptional OER materials and integrating evidence-based mind, brain, and education science (MBES). This module will take a look at the concept and science of learner variability, and investigate and apply two models for designing instruction for learner variability. Students are asked to build on their knowledge of Guided Inquiry Process (see Resources) and OER materials to leveraging learner profiles for effective instructional design.This unit specifically addresses NH ED 614.11.A.1.a and 614.11.A.1.b.

Material Type: Module

Author: Kim Carter