Interactivity #4

Link to Analysis

In the past few weeks in my classroom observations, I latched onto a ton of great strategies that I saw teachers use, and saw a great opportunity to apply some of them in a mini-unit on magnetism. Typically, units on electromagnetism prove challenging to most students, particularly in visualization, as magnetic and electric fields are completely invisible. I observed teachers using great online demos on SmartBoards in front of their classes, and found a few that really clarify some tricky topics like A/C current and electromagnetic induction to apply here.

In aligning the standards to the strategies and applied technologies, the first road block was the lack of 12^th grade standards for electromagnetism. Along with other common high school physics topics like optics, there’s a lot missing from the NJCCS in our field. The electricity and magnetism standards only went up to 6^th grade, with no deeper knowledge expected afterwards. Thus, a good portion of my focus went into seeing that the 12^th grade standards for science practices were incorporated into the lesson delivery. To accomplish this, I also incorporated some extra technology resources to support a more appropriate lecture, encourage effective social collaboration, and prepare students to independently create a lab project later on in the year. This would involve them returning to sites with online interactive demonstrations and designing a tangible experiment to accompany a selected demo.

The original technology list from the lesson plan only incorporated the lab equipment, magnets and simple electrical circuitry, and a few online resources for clarification. This was essential to the learning, but left room for improvement. My additions of the virtual demos and opportunities for group work deepened learning opportunities even further.