Great online resources

http://wise.berkeley.edu/ This is a great website. It is free to create a teacher account. You then have students create free accounts with the password that it gives to you. Once that is established students can go online and do inquiry based science projects. You can manage their progress, read their notes, and see their lab responses.
http://www.terrificscience.org

Agenda items

For the next two meetings this month, I'll bring along a strategy called "SORT" aimed at helping students effectively search Internet sites for research projects. The big issue in the literature on Internet searching, apart from problems that arise when students enter erroneous information in the search engine and simply get lost in the morass of sites listed, is "source evaluation." In essence, who is the site author? What organization supports the site? What are the biases and positions associated with this site? In short, engaging students in critical reading related to sites. As Mary McNabb points out, some students are absolutely enamored with sites that appear attractive, even though the information may be wrong.

Look forward to seeing you this week at our meeting.
Tom