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Global Warming Level: Secondary --- Content: Science |
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Mr. Patel is a secondary school physics teacher who is teaching a unit on thermal energy transfer. He plans to ground this unit in the unit questions, “How has the earth’s climate changed in the past? and What is likely to happen to the climate in the future?” He also prepares his students to be good citizens by introducing them to the topic of global warming, a current scientific controversy that has political and economic consequences. In order to understand this controversy they need to acquire basic knowledge of energy transfer and how this is related to global warming. He has groups of students use the Intel Seeing Reason, causal mapping tool to show their knowledge of the cause and effect of global warming. Mr. Patel gives the students an online pretest made up of open-ended questions related to climate and energy transfer, e.g., “What effect do humans have on climate? Why does the inside of your car parked in the sun seem warmer than the outside air? What is global warming?” He uses an online tool called Poll Everywhere to ask the students these questions. This assessment provides him with an understanding of what students already know and how to focus his instruction. The probes also create a time for telling, i.e., they help the students identify gaps in their knowledge and focus their research and study to fill these gaps. The students then form small groups and each group uses Internet
resources to find answers to the following questions. (They may have to
translate some of these documents or websites to their native language using Google translate.)
Once they have answers to these questions, each group uses a drawing tool called Cacoo to create a graph or model of an energy system that explains how the sun warms the earth. The models explain where the energy comes from, how it moves, and where it goes. Students compare their static energy system graphs with an animated simulation of the greenhouse effect and they test their understanding of the cause of global warming with this simulation. The students return to their Seeing Reason maps to show an update of their thinking as often as they need to in order to show their understanding of causal concepts. During their research, the students have noticed that many scientists and politicians do not agree on the causes and effects of global warming or how to prevent it. Mr. Patel uses Poll Everywhere and asks students to take a position concerning the global warming controversy. He asks them to write a claim to respond to the following statement: “Global warming is a serious problem.” He divides the class into two teams based on their responses and then asks for volunteers to take part in a debate. In order to prepare for the debate, students use the Intel Showing Evidence tool and learn how to construct well-reasoned arguments and prove their case with credible evidence. The Showing Evidence tool provides a visual framework to make claims, identify evidence, evaluate the quality of that evidence, explain how the evidence supports or weakens claims, and reach conclusions based on the evidence. He chooses two student leaders from each team. One of these chosen students is the speaker for their team and the other serves as an assistant providing information to the speaker during the debate. The rest of the class supports their team by sending short messages called tweets to their team’s leaders from the research they conducted. These messages contain comments and questions to alert the debate leaders to errors or to suggest additional resources. The tweets are also fed to the school librarian who monitors the discussion and helps the students identify relevant resources. During the debate, the teacher uses Sap Web 2.0 tools as a mood meter. If students hear something that causes them to change their mind about the global warming controversy, they can send a tweet to update their position. The mood meter picks up the most recent tweets and shows the updated “mood” of the students. The tweets become a dynamic assessment of the effect of the debate on students’ positions. At the end of the timed debate, the teacher uses Poll Everywhere to ask the students to vote on which team won the debate and to give their current position on the controversy. Students also update their Seeing Reason maps to visualize their latest thinking. Finally, Mr. Patel gives a post-test to see how much the students have learned from their research and debates. He uses the same open-ended questions he used for the pretest. He gives the students grades based on this post-test, their graphic representation of the energy system and on their collaboration and effort during the research and debate activities. To assess their collaboration, he uses a rubric he found and adapted from the Intel Assessing Projects tool. Tools used in this scenario: Visualization: Virtual collaboration: Twitter http://twitter.com/ Reasoning tools: Intel Seeing Reason Tool http://educate.intel.com/en/ThinkingTools/SeeingReason Intel Assessing Projects Tool: http://educate.intel.com/en/AssessingProjects
Documentation Tools: Intel Showing Evidence Tool: http://educate.intel.com/en/ThinkingTools/ShowingEvidence
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