Another Rube Goldberg STEM Session at UNI Elementary Literacy Conference

How Rube Goldberg Led Our 6th Grade Students to Pursue their Passions - UNI Elem Lit Conf from Leigh Zeitz
 

What do Rube Goldberg, STEM and Literacy have in common?  

That's a good question. I have been invited to share our Rube Goldberg experiences as a Featured Speaker at the UNI Elementary Literacy Conference.

Interestingly enough, I will be sharing the stage with Dr. Beth Van Meeteren (STEM in PreK-3rd Grades: A Reason to Develop Literacy); Marcy Seavey (Finding the Citizen Scientist in Every Child); and Rick Vanderwall (Media and Drama Integration with Literacy)   It will be an exciting opportunity for all.

Today I will be sharing our Rube Goldberg experiences in the 6th Grade Waverly-Shell Rock Middle School.  We will discuss the explorational process that we experienced while creating our own inventions to accomplish simple tasks.  These tasks might be turning off a light, erasing a blackboard, or popping a balloon. These may seem like meaningless tasks, but its not about turning out a light.  The emphasis of this process is the creative problem solving that our students experienced while they were building these inventions.

If you want to learn more about my presentation, you can refer to my other posts in DrZReflects.  The Slide Show is available in the list below as well as some of the other resources that I used in preparation.

• UNI Elementary Literacy Conference.
• UNI Teaching STEM Elements Using Rube Goldberg Inventions Powerpoint slideshow
• Invent Tomorrow Links - List of the links I used sharing Rube Goldberg resources.
• Rube Goldberg Inc. 
• Purdue University 2014 Rube Goldberg Winners
• Rube Goldberg Ideas video

STEM

• Nationalacademies - STEM Integration in K-12 Education - GREAT 4 minute video!!
• StemAdvantage.org - Good source for STEM Stats
• TeachThought - Incredible Education Blog

Project-Based Learning 

• Difference between Projects and Project-Based Learning
• Buck Institute for Education -  Leading resource for Problem-Based Learning

Do you have more resources you want to share?  Please add them to the comments below.

Z

David Warlick at ITEC: Rebooting the Basics!!! Literacy and Learning in the 21st Century!!!

Sitting in the ITEC Keynote session by David Warlick. He has started his presentation by showing all of the ways in which he is sharing this information with us. He has a wiki that collects all of the blog postings about this session. He has asked us to include the words "Redefine, Literacy, Warlick" in the tags. Hope this works.

Scott McLeod is running a back channel at http://tinyurl.com/2d4hpm

His handouts are available at http://davidwarlick/handouts

He says that we spend too much time teaching students to use paper. We need to teach them how to use light and digital.

He has just shown that Wikipedia is filled with warnings about content accuracy. Made the note that these sources are telling you about possible problems but textbooks don't do that. We need to teach about Reading that "Exposes what is true." They need to develop the skills to find information that is appropriate to what is to be achieved.

Says we should stop teaching technology and teach literacy. Today we are working on Literacy: Reading, Writing, Arthmetic. Need to change to new literacy. Part of being literate today is to ask questions - Who wrote this? What is the Source? Who published this? Is it valid?
Literate learners know how to find these answers.

URL Backtrack: Go to the end of a URL and delete the address until we find the sources.

He has just shown us a website about Dr. Martin Luther King. It didn't have the author on it. He used the Webmaster's email address to track it back to the publishers of it, Stormfront.org, a White supremecy organization.

Just ran a cloud creator on the text of a number of US president inaugural speeches to analyze them and show which words are used the most. Looks like government is the most used word. Interesting way to analyze text for writing classes. Would be fun to see in Wordle.com

Talking about the Long Tail phenomenon. This is an analysis of the books and movies that don't sell enough copies to warrant store space, but they do sell to some people and make some money. Rapsody makes 27% of its income from Long Tail.

He is now talking about how he uses lulu.com to publish books. His first book was available for purchase 1 hour after he submitted it to Lulu. Not bad.

Showing a video about sweatshops created by a high school girl instead of writing an essay on why globalization can be a problem. She was supported by Marco Torres in southern California. Music was quite effective.

Warlick just said that we have to include the arts into our definition of literacyl

Warlick's definition of today's literacy:

• Expressing what's true
• employing the information
• expressing ideas compellingly
• Ethical Use of information

Just showed us his English teacher and told us how she taught exactly the same way for 42 years. We can't do that anymore. Things and students are continually changing.

We will have reached true educational reform when no teachers believe that they can teach the same thing over and over and over again.

Closed by sharing a blog called "We're NOT Afraid." werenotafraid.com