Science Technology Project Ideas

As a follow up to our focus on technology integration at the department level, and after meeting with all department heads, below are detailed a number of technology project ideas (using either the iPads, the computer labs or the 3D printer) specific to your department. It is our hope that at least one of these ideas might inspire you as you plan out your courses for the rest of the year.

1. One project that could be used in most classrooms is the student creation of an interactive textbook using either the iPad app Book Creator (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/book-creator-for-ipad/id442378070?mt=8) or iBooks Author (http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/) in the library computer lab. iBooks Author is the app Trevor used to create his writing textbook. Students could create these for themselves as study guides or for younger students and they can contain all types of media, graphics, audio and video.

2. And in Science a creative way to use the book creation apps mentioned in the previous point is to create interactive lab reports. As well as scientific writing and data presentation you could use the more interactive elements to insert video of the experiments, photographs of the equipment, etc.

3. Online scientific writing portfolios, either as a classroom blog with comments and discussion or individual portfolios that is updated by each student throughout the year . The two main options for this kind of online site is through either an official Hebron Academy WordPress blog or through the the student’s own Google Apps Blogger account. Another option for this is also a personal Google Site, but the key with all these options is the ability to embed text, images, audio and video to demonstrate their learning and improvement over a period of time.

4. VR in the classroom. I have just ordered a set of Google Cardboard (https://vr.google.com/cardboard/) which well let us bring VR into the classroom. One app that we can then use, especially in Environmental Science classes, is Google Expeditions (https://www.google.com/edu/expeditions/) which will let students explore all kinds of natural environments from Antartica to coastal reefs. I will send out more information about this technology later in the year and my faculty tech training during the next semester will be based around all of this.

5. Create a screencast with the Explain Everything app. This app lets you import all kinds of media and files and lets a student basically record a presentation as a video into the iPad. It records all their movements and annotations within the slides as well as recording their voice. Is very useful for students to plan out and explain a complicated concept. This gives you a good overview of the app: http://blogs.hebronacademy.org/technology/2015/02/19/explain-everything/

6. Another way to using video in the Science classroom is using animation techniques like stop motion or frame-based to create visual representations of the concepts they have been studying. We have done a lot of stop motion projects with the middle school (http://blogs.hebronacademy.org/technology/?s=stop+motion+) and for frame-based animation we would use this app on the iPads: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/animation-drawing-by-do-ink/id364762290?mt=8. Here is an example from my previous school where we used animation to create Minute Physics (https://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics) style videos: https://techois.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/grade-9-physics-forces-animations/

7. Here are a couple of different services and an example of some interesting infographics that can be created using technology: https://infogr.am, https://www.canva.com/create/infographics/, http://www.informationisbeautiful.net. These are creative ways of visualizing data and could be used for presentations or classroom displays.

8. Programming on the iPad, which is an excellent way of teaching problem solving, logic and algorithms to students. There are a wide range of options to do this on the iPad from Swift Playgrounds (http://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/), which contains all in one courses and material, to simpler more block based program construction using either Hopscotch (https://www.gethopscotch.com) or Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu).

9. Interviews/podcasts/recordings using AudioCopy or GarageBand. This could be as simple as recording scripted conversations or role plays and then editing them for errors, or creating complete radio shows with professional postproduction including a soundtrack, sound effects, etc. This presentation gives a good overview of podcasting in the classroom: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lRc8rAVVNR61VR6JnEhspH84W93vNZ8VMX
6GL3Lmo4U/present?slide=id.g838051e1d_2_3
. In Science this could be used to create more documentary style audio recordings, similar to something NPR might create.

10. Creation of objects, artifacts and shapes in 3D. Using modeling tools like SketchUp, Tinkercad and Sculptris students are able to create all kinds of 3D shape and objects that can then be printed in physical form. Multiple objects can be created and then positioned together to create more detailed models, for display or presentation. Here is a good overview of what has been done with our 3D printer so far: http://blogs.hebronacademy.org/technology/2016/10/21/3d-printer-update/

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