I bought the EyeClops video microscope last week and it arrived yesterday. I took it to school and my students had it up and running in no time. I was interested to see the quality of the images and video and to see if this would be something I could use in the classroom. The [...]
Philippine-American Life Through a Scientific Lens
Category Archives: Teaching Methods
Don’t Get Burned Out
Any teacher will tell you that teaching is a demanding job and that it’s easy to get burned out. The key is to recognize the warning signs and to take action. Elaine Plybon over at Cruel Shoes has a good post dealing with this topic. This post caught my attention because I was just thinking [...]
What is my elevator pitch? Challenge 1
Today I start the 31 day challenge given by ProBlogger on how to improve one’s blog. This will be quite the challenge for me as I work all day and I am tired when I arrive home. Still, I want to improve Siyensya and focus in on where I want this site to go. The [...]
My New Thesis Theme
Welcome to the new Siyensya using the Thesis theme. I was looking for something more polished and flexible and I have found it with this theme. Thesis requires WordPress 2.7 so I had to upgrade this past weekend. My web host uses Fantastico, but they are only up to WP 2.6.5. So last Sunday I [...]
Obama’s Science Advisors
Today, President-elect Barack Obama selected John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco as science advisers. Obama said “It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.” Also joining Obama’s science team is Nobel Prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus and professor [...]
The Vacuum Packed Teacher
We are learning about air pressure and I thought a good idea would be to have the students experience what the pressure feels like. The students enjoy going in the “great garbage bag vacuum model of science” Here I am in the bag. Use a very large construction bag and insert a vacuum. The air [...]
A Three Color Density Lab
The class did a density lab where they change the density of water by adding different amounts of salt. The hard part is to decant the solution so the different densities don’t mix. We used food coloring to show each different density layer. The bottom layer has 2.5 teaspoons of salt. The middle layer has [...]
Bisaya Lessons
I have started taking my Bisaya lessons again with my teacher, Bebe, who lives in the Philippines. We are using Wiziq, an online teaching platform. I have scanned in the first ten lessons as we will need to review these so I can get back up to speed. Our first lesson online was difficult as [...]
Liquid Colloids Lab
Here is a good lab to check the observational skills of your students. I do this early in the year so I can check my class procedures for lab clean up. The students will also see something that is not expected, which adds to the excitement. The students will also have some practice measuring with [...]
A Metric Lesson With Groovy Cubes
A neat way to help students internalize a cubic centimeter is to make paper cubic centimeters, aka Groovy Cubes. All my classes made them this week and we strung them together on thread. I’ll hang them up tomorrow in the classroom. We also discussed how one cubic centimeter will hold one milliliter of pure water [...]