SMART APPlications

To enhance our technological savvy, my critical friends and I designed a lesson that utilizes not only the classroom SMARTBoard but also an interactive science education website designed for all grade levels. In only ten minutes, Grade Two students were able to manipulate water to change it from a solid state to liquid state to gaseous state and back again. Through us asking inquisitive questions, students were required to access their prior knowledge and apply what they know from personal experience to the new learning at hand. With a ten-minute time crunch, it was crucial students make connections to the real world in order to inform a basic understanding of the new concept. For example, my group and I accessed prior knowledge in our hook by asking the sequence of questions

1.     “Who has ever gone ice skating outside?”,

2.     “Did you go in the summer? Why not?”, and

3.     “So, how does the water become frozen enough to skate on in the winter?”

Students were immediately able to form general understandings of the unique characteristics distinctive to each state of water, and how these characteristics are relevant to each student (i.e. students cannot go skating unless the water is in a solid state and students cannot go swimming unless the water is in a liquid state). Students could visually make these connections and conclusions while our group manipulated the interactive heating and cooling of a block of ice. One conclusion presented by a student was unexpected by our group. The student suggested that as a block of ice gradually heated up it released steam into the air. This phenomenon was not something that was occurring in the interactive activity and was thus a great connection to something they observed in their own experiences. However, I was able to quickly address this misconception as steam was not what was in the air but rather most likely water vapour. I was able to help this particular student, as well as the rest of the class and my teaching team, understand that it was not steam by asking them if they have ever held their hand over a kettle when there was steaming coming out of it. I could use this example to explain that it hurts to hold your hand over steam and that if you held your hand over the “steam” that was escaping a block of ice your hand would not hurt because it was not actually steam. In order to be steam, the block of ice would have to change states two times, to a liquid and then to a gas, in order to produce steam. I found that using this on-the-fly exemplar and explanation turned light bulbs on in students minds as they instantly made connections between the new learning and their prior knowledge. In the future however, I think it would be important to allow students to manipulate the changing of states in order to target kinesthetic learnings who require moving and performing activities themselves. By doing so, I think understanding of the new concept could have been established more quickly. All in all, with the limitations of ten minutes, I think our ability to address misconceptions immediately and make in depth connections to real world contexts that are relevant to our particular students helped us to establish and deepen understanding in a timely manner.

In my future teaching practice, I can see myself using this website as part of a science centres activity to help a small group of students interact with concepts they are learning. As well, as students develop deeper understandings of some concepts, I can incorporate selected interactive activities in my daily routine to reinforce conceptual knowledge and in depth understandings. As this website supplied games, experiments, and activities for science, mathematics, and English language arts, I can see myself using suggested activities to incorporate into my lesson plans as well as to inform my integration of curricula.

If you are interested in checking out our lesson plan and the interactive activity we used, click the links!