I use Google Apps for Education almost every day in my classroom. One of my favorite ways to use Google is to have students create digital graphs. The video below will show you, and your students, how to use Google…
I first ran across the terms “unobservable scales” and “unobservable mechanisms” early in my NGSS journey. I had no idea what these were. Unfortunately, a Google search didn’t provide any answers. Read this post to find out what the terms…
The Crosscutting Concepts are often the last dimension of the NGSS that teachers incorporate into their lessons. In this post, I answer some common questions about the Crosscutting Concepts. Questions About the Crosscutting Concepts What are the Crosscutting Concepts? The…
The Crosscutting Concepts are one of the three dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards. They help students make connections to the Disciplinary Core Ideas and make sense of the Science and Engineering Practices. It’s important to avoid these five…
Exit tickets are one of my favorite types of formative assessments to use in an NGSS aligned classroom. My exit tickets used to be made of low-level knowledge-based questions, but since making the shift to NGSS I have had to…
I got a question from a reader last week asking me if I knew of any good resources for writing NGSS aligned lab reports. At face value, this seems like a very simple question. But with the adoption of the…
I get so many questions asking about the relationship between NGSS storylines and phenomena, but I am rarely asked about student questions. In an ideal scenario, student questions would be at the heart of your storyline. How do student questions…
In my last post, I wrote about how I create cohesive storylines for a bundle. Unfortunately, that isn’t the end of the planning process. Building your initial storyline is an outline that helps you get an idea of where you…
Creating bundles is an important step in the lesson planning process. Here are 5 tips for creating NGSS bundles. 1. Review the NGSS bundles that already exist. You don’t have to follow someone else’s model, but it doesn’t hurt to…
I have gotten several messages from people over the last few weeks about how I create cohesive storylines. Honestly, it is a difficult question to answer, because I am not a linear planner. I wrote this blog post last year…
