Recently I have been working on some Doodle Videos to help my students better understand plants.  This one is geared for middle school students learning the complex fern life cycle. If you are interested in the accompanying resources, please check out my Seedless Vascular Plant Lesson for Middle School

Many of us a making online resources for our students and printable packets for those that lack internet.  Here's a two tips to save you time and energy.
1.  Plan out your content first.  I like to create a presentation that lays out my lesson.  That way if I am teaching live, recording or sending a copy home, all kids are getting similar materials.
2.  Print to PDF is an easy way to take your presentations and turn them into packet forms that can be send home.  The following clip will explain how this work.

Stay well!

During this next month I am going to be hosting a series of short tips for teaching science online.  These short videos will provides quick and simple lesson I have learned overs the past decade as an online teacher and course designer. 

As we are dealing with creating learning experience for our students at home and online I wanted to take some time to post FREE online resources that can be used to help kids maintain their progress without teachers and parents spending hours at home.  

Passion is defined as a “strong feeling of enthusiasm or excitement for something or about doing something.” Teachers make lessons come alive when they are passionate.  What gets you going?  Consider incorporating it into your next class.  Be passionate, smile, have fun in the classroom.  Your students will remember you for it.

Found this great resource for making sour dough bread in science class. This project would be great for discussing cell energy, classification (fungi kingdom) or just a really cool science experiment. The graphic alone would be a great discussion point.  All from Januarys issue of NSTA Science Scope. #scistarter   #NSTA 

Eggs are a great tool for modeling cells in middle school.  Kids love to work with them and the challenge of keeping them safe is always fun.  Placing an egg in vinegar over several days will remove the shell.  Once complete, this bouncy egg is perfect for experiments.  Drop it in corn syrup and watch it deflate because of osmosis.  Put it in distilled water and it will swell up as water flows to areas of higher concentration.  Want to have some fun, let your students bring in test liquids when you are all finished, Mountain Dew, Kool Aid and Sprite are popular.  These sugary substances will color your eggs and make them swell up.  In addition, students can examine the eggs with a desk lamp to get a better idea of what is inside.  Don't forget to have the kids mass you eggs daily, this provides for good quantitative data that can be easily graphed.

Looking for resources for these activity's?  Check out a few of our cell resources.

Canvas is a great tool for classrooms because grading and organizing content is a breeze.  Google Drive shines as a content platform for right resources that I want my students to use.  This short video explains how to use force copy links in your Canvas assignments to get the best of both worlds. 

Looking for science lesson using Google Inter actives like the one in this video, following the links below.