Sensing Science Online PD Spring 2016 |
Sensing Science
Teaching Land of Bump - An Online Course for Kindergarten to Grade 2 Teachers
We invite you to join us this March (2016) for a three-week interactive online course that will guide you through introducing concepts of temperature and heat transfer to your students using our game-like Land of Bump software. This software runs on computers or tablets inside a Web browser and could be used with children in many different types of settings. This software is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project called Sensing Science (http://concord.org/projects/sensing-science) and is free for all to use.
Sensing Science has worked with K-2 students in small research groups and with teachers within their classrooms in Massachusetts. You can read more about our initial work (http://concord.org/publications/newsletter/2014-spring/sensing-science) or more specifically work with the Land of Bump software (http://concord.org/publications/newsletter/2015-fall/land-of-bump).
The course requires approximately 10 hours of work outside of the classroom and at least one 45-55 minute class period with your students (during course week 2 or 3). Your participation requires access to a computer with Internet connectivity for the moderated, asynchronous online course and new-ish tablets or computers with fairly strong Internet access for your students to work in class. (Please test the story at http://lob.concord.org.) An ideal classroom arrangement is a computer or tablet for every two children, but other arrangements are welcome.
We are very excited about testing the software in a wide variety of schools and allowing teachers to use their best practices to determine how their students would learn from the use of the software. The course will help teachers to become familiar with the topic of temperature and heat, work with the software before using it with their students, and then share the experiences with their children with the entire team online in Schoology (a free online course delivery system). A stipend of $300 for the three-week online course will be provided to those who complete the entire course, which includes conducting a lesson with your students using the Land of Bump.