blog posts

• How to Discuss Vaccines in a Classroom

  Feb 6, 2015 9:00 am654 views

  In light of the measles outbreak in California and the Southwest, are you wondering what role, if any, schools can play in teaching students about vaccines?  Here are a few resources including lesson plans about the science of vaccines, infectious diseases, and modeling an outbreak.

   

• Science Fairy Tales

  Jan 30, 2015 8:45 am44 views

  This post from the PBS NewsHour blog has great advice about the kind of stories to tell your children before bedtime.  Mixing up the nightly story routine with tales of scientists is a wonderful idea.

   

• Code a Holiday Tree at the White House

  Dec 5, 2014 2:15 pm143 views

  This holiday season, Made With Code (part of Google’s initiative to increase diversity in Computer Science) teamed up with the National Park Service and National Park Foundation and put 56 programmable holiday trees (one for each state and US territory) in President’s Park at the White House. Girls (and boys, too!) can visit Made With Code's Code the Holidays project and use blockly, a tile-based programming language, to design a light show pattern that will appear in real life on the tree for their state in President’s Park. Once your code is submitted, you’ll get a notification about what time your code will play on the tree.

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  Kenwood Students Steal the Show at Board Meeting

  Oct 29, 2014 9:45 am114 views

  So, it’s been two years since MSTE started working with Champaign Unit 4 Schools, Computer Science, Library Science, some local entrepreneurs as part of a group that is now known CTRL-Shift.  Monday night, October 27, was one of the great pay-off moments for CTRL-Shift. A group of Kenwood Elementary School students stood before the Unit 4 School Board and shared their computational thinking skills. They used the interactive whiteboard, their Chromebooks, and good ‘ole pencil and paper to show computer science - unplugged and on the computer. There were plenty of “oh”s and “ah”s. And it may be the first time that anyone has described a school board meeting as “fun!”

• Back-to-School: Confidence in Science

  Aug 28, 2014 10:30 am72 views