Saturday Morning Tweets - Idea!

I have been spending most of this holiday weekend Saturday morning navigating through many of the Twitter members and lists of users. I had been able to make contact with several fellow science teachers across the US and am now following many lists. In time I do hope to be able to share some new tools and successful strategies that I will be using in the classroom.

I think my first project will be to incorporate student use of Web 2.0 tools into the annual National Parks Project which is the climax of our Geology Unit. In this project I ask the students to research and explore a US National Park of their own choosing, within several parameters. From there they are to apply many of the geologic concepts of plate movement, faulting, mountain building, volcanoes, weathering and erosion and so forth, to the actual natural geologic formation of their chosen park. The real assessment is to determine if the students can apply what they learned in class to a real world situation. My overall theme for the year is "How does this relate to the world around you?", and this project takes the knowledge of geologic processes and allows them to explain using a National Park as their subject. They have the most fun building 3-D models of their park or a specific feature of their park, such as Old Faithful, Half Dome, Grand Canyon, Delicate Arch and so forth. I use the USGS web site Tour of Park Geology as a starting point for the project.

I now have to give some thought as to how to use more Web 2.0 tools for them to use, such as presentation media, a blog site, Animoto videos, etc, as a way for them to share their info. I hope to find a way to attach the assignment sheet to this post so that I can share and hopefully get some feedback as well!