It's A Gassy World

 Due to time constraints and technology - the lab had to be modified in order to fit within a 50 minute "live" class with up to 30 minutes of independent student time.   To fit this timeline, the slides showing the steps needed for the investigation were removed from the presentation and made available for students as supplemental information.  Looking at the digital version from September, this would translate to slides 19-23 being removed and slide 18 being modified for students to submit ideas directly to the Google Chat.  With that in Mind....Planning and Carrying out the Investigation PLANNING  By opening up the chat and allowing students to brainstorm ideas freely, they were able to come up with all sorts of ideas.  Since an earlier slide had shown a pepsi bottle, a few students in each class suggested using soda for the test and that generally became THE idea everyone wanted to use.   All of the class were able to point out out how har...

 The biggest challenges with this activity was fitting everything in the time constraints and making sure every students had the materials needed to understand the concepts within the framework of the digital classroom. After doing the lab with my first period class and running out of time, I removed the additional lab set-up videos mentioned in the first post.  This gave students more time to brainstorm possible solutions and to discuss the changes being shown in the NASA temperature change video.   One of the big areas my students struggled with was the Carbon Cycle which is something many of them hadn't seen since 6th.  I added some additional resources to the Learn About It (Explore) section of the lesson where students could either "review" or "go further" with the concepts during there independent time.  I also gave students time at the end of class to use those resources or to go to the written response.  In the future, I would have students rev...

 So what did I learn?  I learned that students having missed a large chunk of the environmental biology unit in Grade 7, resulted in more time being spent reviewing Big Picture concepts regarding relationships between organisms within an ecosystem.  While I had taught 8th grade the previous year with similar objectives, I only taught AA students so it's hard to know if this was due to the COVID-19 shutdown occurring during this unit or a difference between AA and non-AA students.  I learned that students are really fascinated by soda and I'm interested to see if there is a way to alter the experiment to use soda in place of alka seltzer - at least for filming a teacher instruction video as I'm sure this would get costly.  I also found students retained a lot of information from their 7th Grade chemistry unit which leads me to believe the environmental impact issues were due to the shutdown but that is certainly something to investigate further in the next school...