The Scientific Teacher

In my last post about reinventing science notebooks, I described my summer project to introduce digital versions of the traditional science notebook with my students next fall. Before I get into the nitty gritty techie side of how to do this, I’d like to state my goals for these digital science notebooks. Although I’m currently leaning toward a Google Apps/Google Sites combination for these digital notebooks, I’m not wedding to any technology in particular, and if anyone out there has a better idea for what tool could accomplish these goals, I’m all ears! So here goes:

#1: Help students stay organized, easily

Middle School students are notoriously bad at organization, so I’m looking for a solution that will make it easy for students keep assorted types of documents organized. Just like a 3-ring binder could have sections for homework, notes, lab work, project research, I want their digital notebooks to keep things orderly, well labeled, and chronological. Unlike a 3-ring binder I don’t want students to waste a lot of time hole-punching, sorting, and still ultimately misplacing their documents!

#2: Share students’ learning like a portfolio

We do student led conferences at my school, and it’s a powerful experience for students to share their learning and reflect about their learning with their parents. The past few years we’ve had students set up an “e-Portfolio” using a GoogleSite, so they can put all of their evidence and reflections in one place, but this is a time-consuming task. As long as it is set up in an attractive, reflective way, a digital notebook could double as an e-portfolio.

#3: Enable and encourage collaborative learning

Most science classrooms are naturally collaborative, but the collaboration doesn’t need to end at the lab table. Tools such as Google Docs make it easy for students to share work and ideas with others, as well as comment and build on each others ideas. A good digital notebook should allow for different types of collaboration (peer, small group, whole class) as well as allow for some documents to be private when collaboration isn’t appropriate.

#4: Connect students with learning resources

This is something that can really set digital notebooks apart from their papery counterparts: the ability to link up students with learning resources that can help them either review or extend their learning. Imagine a student finishes up a lab on the properties of solids and liquids, but they’ve still got some questions the lab activity didn’t answer. A digital notebook could allow the teacher to provide links to different online resources for the student to explore further. There could be links to similar content for the struggling student to review as well as links to new material to challenge those students that are ready to move on.

#5: Give students more feedback about their learning

This last goal might be the most challenging but also the most important. With traditional science notebooks the teacher could periodically collect the notebooks and write feedback to students, but we teachers know  how time-consuming that is. I began this past year with a goal of giving more formative assessment-type feedback to my students, but it became challenging to keep up with the pace. The more immediate feedback is, the greater the impact it will have on student learning, so a good digital notebook could help provide additional opportunities for learning feedback, as well a keeping a record of their progress. I’m imagining a kind of “learning dashboard” for each student that would keep track of all their learning progress from many types of feedback: graded teacher feedback, practice quizes results, self-reflections. I’m not the first person to think of this (Kahn Academy has a “gameified” learning dashboard, and my school is currently creating one a school-wide one), but I’ve yet to see something that takes advantage of teacher’s online gradebooks and feedback and create a student-friendly summary of their learning progress.

So there you have it. I know it’s an ambitious list, but I think there is a ton of potential in education technology tools that are currently being way under-utilized. Hopefully with the help of like-minded teachers out there, we can move science notebooking into the 21st century where it belongs! 🙂

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