| We love coyotes in my classroom. Last year after one was removed from the Aldi in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, we learned that there are an estimated 2,000-4,000 coyotes living in the Chicagoland area. Late winter/early spring is also mating season which causes the coyotes to have increased activity and to be out more during the day. Working in a city-wide magnet school where students come from 44 different zip codes provides us with the unique ability to track coyotes sightings across the city. Students, staff and families share sightings with us and we map them out on our official coyote tracker map. They will also send in sightings they see on social media. |  Our classroom coyote tracker. |
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These activities were compiled and shared with the students in my elementary school prior to us beginning remote learning.  Day 14: Marble Roller Coaster
You will construct the ultimate marble roller coaster using cardboard, paper, and paper plates. If you don’t have a marble you can use any small ball you may have laying around. Here are some directions and ideas to get you started. Note: This was shared the Friday before spring break and is meant to take more than one day to complete.
This was originally posted on the MSUrbanSTEM blog on January 18th, 2018
A few months ago I was leading a professional development for teachers on ways to support student collaboration via G Suite. On the feedback form at the end of the session one of the participants wrote, “I see how this is useful, but am I a science teacher or am I a technology teacher?” I admit this question gave me pause. Who is responsible for teaching technology? Just like like how every teacher is responsible for teaching literacy, given our technology-infused world I would argue that every teacher should be a technology teacher.
For many of my friends with children December 1st marks the start of finding new and creative ways to pose their elf on the shelf. Inspired by these photos, I created a template for students and teachers to build their own scenes using Google Drawing. You can access the template here. Please share your completed scenes with me via email or @MrKosko on Twitter. Also, I would love to include a more diverse set of elves to this template. If you are anyone you know have PNG files of diverse elves (race and gender) in various poses please contact me.   My elf helping my favorite prehistoric friend, SUE, get into the holiday spirit.
I've been hearing more about more about schools purchasing 3D printers, but teachers being unsure about how to actually implement the technology in their classrooms. Last year I built out a makerspace at my former school complete with three 3D printers. I introduced a series of design thinking challenges that asked students to 3D print artifacts for an actual user. One such project asked students to create and print a necklace pendant for a friend.
Last month, I was honored to present my jewelry design thinking project to my colleagues at our district's annual tech conference, Tech Talk & Googlepalooza. You can view my deck from the session here.  This year we are welcoming a new STEM school to the district, William H. Brown Elementary School. When planning for their introductory professional development, as a team we knew that we wanted to have the teachers participate in a high-quality STEM activity that incorporated the five elements of a STEM unit: STEM standards, authentic (real world examples), STEM careers, transdisciplinary, and the Four Cs).
My colleague, Chris Nho (email, twitter) had the brilliant idea to have the teachers participate in an activity inspired by Dear Data. Dear Data was a year-long project by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, two award-winning information designers. Once a week the designers sent each other personal data in the form of hand drawn postcards and through these messages, they learned more about one another. You can watch a short video about the project here. |
