Ask Slashdot: Online Science For 8th Grade Students? 225
Peterus7 writes "I'm a student teacher in an 8th grade science classroom, and have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online. After realizing that, I've been looking for ways to incorporate internet resources into my teaching, and trying to find cool citizen science projects, activities, and simulations that would be appropriate for a grade school science class, such as galaxyzoo and fold.it. So, I'm asking slashdot for more resources that could help bring science to their lives. Thanks!"
Get offline and do experiments (Score:5, Insightful)
Do real experiments. The kids will remember that.
Re:Anything Online? (Score:5, Insightful)
They may like teaching, but many of them (that I've seen) don't appear to be good at it. If you don't have patience, you really, really shouldn't be a teacher.
I think we need to make teaching more attractive as a career to build a bigger (hopefully better) pool of applicants to pick from. Regardless of what Fox News says, they are underpaid considering the job requirements and stress they deal with.
Bad Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
"I.. have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online."
I call bullshit. You're noticing students motivated by non-school things, that happen to be online. Put school online and they will be equally disinterested as before. (Although you get to be that teacher going "Look! I'm hip! I get online! I'm so cool!").
Or, show me an experiment that an online program has better interest-level and/or student outcomes (from the same population of student).
Re:KhanAcademy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Anything Online? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the money that's the problem really. Oh sure, the newbies make shit money, but they eventually do all right.
The problem is the job itself, and its not getting easier.
I am given to understand that garbage men make a pretty decent wage. However, the reason that many don't consider that a field worth aspiring to is because as a job, it fucking sucks. The same thing goes for teaching, only the suckage comes from a different set of causes.
Personally, from my observations, schools would benefit more from hiring more people to help, than they would benefit by paying existing teachers more money. There is no lack of people qualified to do something in a school. What there is a lack of is people hired to do that work. Workloads are high, and classroom sizes are getting bigger. They need more people, but the fact of the matter is that the very unions with their tenure and working to increase existing teacher salaries means that the number of open positions for people who train to be teachers is pretty small. They can't very well hire more people if they have to either give them tenure or worse, not be able to keep them on because otherwise the union will force the district to hand out tenure or to let them go.
Teachers may well be a little underpaid, but what they are mostly is *under supported*.