Even if you’re not a member of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), you can access their 2009 NECC conference blog. The National Educational Computing Conference is scheduled for June 28-July 1 in Washington, DC, and if you’re in the area, this is a great conference, with up-to-date and visionary sessions and exhibits in the field of educational technology.
The conference is more than a month away, but there has been a lot of activity and some interesting questions and suggestions: libraries of the future, iPhone apps for education, and digital graphing tools. Several interesting topics were discussed: Should schools sacrifice class time for professional development? Is it necessary for conference presenters to provide hard copies of materials? How can students submit assignments via cell phones?
If you’re looking for ideas more closely related to science, the NSTA journals have many articles on the relationship between science and technology. My favorites are the ones that describe how students of all ages are using technology creatively.

I just finished my first year in the classroom. It was a challenge, but I learned a lot. With the end of the school year approaching, do you have any tips for what should I think about or prepare for next year?
—Rene, South Bend, Indiana
Congratulations for completing your first year! You’ll find the end of the year is as hectic as the beginning, with exams, grades, inventories, and lab clean-up. You’re also looking forward to vacation time, graduate courses, home improvements, a summer job, or some much-needed rest. But while your memory is fresh, take some time now to review, reflect on, and learn from your experiences. Record your thinking in a journal or in your planning files.
As you go back over your class list(s), ask yourself which students seemed to improve through the year. What did you do to encourage this improvement? Did some students regress during the year? What could you do if this happens again? What strategies did you use to connect with your students? Are there any new strategies you would like to try next year? How effective were your classroom management routines and procedures? Did your students seem to enjoy learning?
Consider your course curriculum. Did some units have different results than you anticipated? Should you change the amount of time or emphasis you put on some units? Did you have an effective combination of science content, skills, and processes? Identify any gaps in your own knowledge base that could be supplemented this summer with online courses, readings, websites, or visits to local informal science institutions (museums, zoos, planetariums, etc.). How well were you able to access and use the technologies available in your school? What kinds of interdisciplinary connections did you make?
As you complete final evaluations/grades for students, ask yourself how well the grades reflect student learning. Or did you factor in things not related to course content? How well did your assessments align with the unit goals and lesson objectives? Did you provide opportunities for students to reflect on their own learning (e.g., through a science notebook, rubrics)?
Although some schools do not require detailed written lesson plans, there are advantages of having plans that can be revisited and adapted the following year. Were your lesson plans detailed enough to be adapted for next year, or will you have to recreate them? Based on your assessment data, what instructional strategies should you change (or keep)? How well were your in-class and homework activities aligned to the unit goals and lesson objectives? Did your lab activities help students to develop their inquiry skills?
On a practical note, check with your principal or department chair for any end-of-year checkout procedures. Your classroom may not be secure during the summer months, so stow your lab equipment in locking cabinets or storage rooms. Take valuable or irreplaceable personal belongings home or lock them in a cabinet. Label any large personal items such as a desk chair or stool with your name. If you have personal documents, tests, grades, or other sensitive information on an unsecured hard drive, transfer them to a network drive or transfer them to a flash drive. Some schools allow teachers to take their assigned computer home for the summer, but don’t take any school equipment home without permission.
Update any equipment inventories and note if anything needs to be repaired. Keep your requisition list for next year handy so you can check in the new materials arriving over the summer. Inventory textbooks, if you keep them in your classroom, so you’ll know if you have enough when you get your new class list. If any books need repair, take care of them now. Make sure items such as glassware, cages, aquariums, sinks, or table tops are clean and ready for next year. If you can, turn off the gas and water in your lab.
Based on your reflections, this might also be a good time to formulate your goals for next year. It’s tempting to say, “I’ll think about this in August.” But if you take some time now for thinking, reflecting, and planning, you’ll have more time in the fall for getting your second year off to a good start.

One of the arguments against year-round schools is that “kids need a break.” But isn’t it ironic that by the end of July, we see articles in newspapers or blogs on the topic of what to do when kids say they’re bored?
Schools often send home a summer reading list. But you can go beyond this with suggestions for inexpensive resources and science-based activities that parents (or other caregivers) can suggest for children or ones that they can all do together. Many teachers put these suggestions on their own websites or on the school website, in addition to sending notes home. The advantage of teacher suggestions (rather than generic ones in the newspaper) is that they can be tailored to a specific age group and connected to the school curriculum.
Get Ready for Summer from the Reading Rockets website has a “beach bag” full of ideas to include in your suggestions for younger children, including science-related ones.
Are there topics you couldn’t get to this year or ones that your students found especially interesting? Perhaps you could suggest some books or websites that address these topics for students to explore on their own. Use SciLinks to identify websites by topic and grade level. Or you could suggest books and websites related to the topics you will address next year, giving students the opportunity for a preview of coming attractions.
If you address a note to parents, here are some websites that have some simple science activities that adults and children could do together. Home Experiments and Kitchen Science Experiments have both demonstrations and experiments. Experiments from Science Bob also has lots of demonstrations as well as a section on “make it an experiment” with suggestions on how to extend the demonstration into an investigation. And The Exploratorium is always a good source for hands-on science activities.
You could also include links to local library and to nearby museums, zoos, and parks. Many of these organizations have free or inexpensive summer programs for children and families.
Several districts I worked also shared the teachers’ summer suggestions with daycare providers and community groups that ran summer activities or day camps for kids. Giving your local public library a heads-up would also be helpful if older students come in and say they have nothing to do.

Sometimes you see a new application on the web and think “This is cool!” – and then as a teacher you wonder “How can I use this?” I recently was introduced to Wordle, a free, Internet-based application. Wordle takes words from a document or list that you input and creates a “word cloud” graphic in which the size of the word is proportional to its frequency. You may have seen these word clouds on some news sites. You can tweak the layout and color schemes and choose whether to include numbers and whether to remove common words (e.g., is, the, are, of).
Just for fun, I pasted NSTA’s position paper on Scientific Inquiry into a wordle. I tweaked the color scheme and font, and here is what was produced.
Cool, isnt’ it? It’s interesting how some words stand out. You may have seen these word clouds on some news sites. There are some shortcomings, though. You can’t save a wordle directly to your computer. You can print it, so I used the PDF feature on my print dialog box to save it as a PDF file. Or you could use a screen capture utility. You can explore various layouts, fonts, and color schemes, but you can’t edit the list after the wordle has been created. So I would create my list or document in a Word file and then copy/paste. If you have a list of words and want some to stand out, you’ll have to enter them multiple times in the list or go to an advanced feature http://www.wordle.net/advanced where you can enter a word and a number (e.g., science:4). You can save your wordle to a public gallery, but there is no search feature. Some of the entries in the public gallery are not very good (and there is no spell-check), and the site has no filter for language that may be inappropriate for a classroom. If you want a two-word phrase to appear, you would have to insert a tilda (e.g., simple~machine) which will not appear on the graphic.
But even with these caveats, I’ve seen (or can think of) ways that Wordle could be useful. Students could copy and paste a writing sample to see the frequency and variety of words they are using (and you can get a frequency chart, too). By changing the frequency of words in a list, you could create a graphic that illustrates essential, important, and nice-to-know vocabulary for a unit. At the beginning of a unit, a teacher I know asked students for words related to the topic. He asked them again at the end, and has the pre- and post- graphics to show informally how students perceptions and knowledge have changed. Students could create them to illustrate their notebooks. Or you could solicit words on a topic at a faculty meeting or in-service event and create a graphic to share and discuss.
My hopes for the next version include the ability to upload a frequency chart (with the word and a number) and the ability to save in a graphic format to use in other applications or documents.
If you’d like a copy of the NSTA Inquiry wordle as a pdf file, click here. I also made a wordle from the position statement on Elementary Science (to share at an event next week). Help yourself, and feel free to add a comment with any other suggestions for how this could be used.