In March I approached Mary Beth Armstrong an eighth grade science teacher about collaborating with her during one of her inquiry investigations. I have known Mary Beth for several years and have worked alongside her during my tenure as a ninth grade science teacher. She is an outstanding teacher and is always looking for ways to keep her instruction fresh, aligned, and timely. She shared with me a lesson Generating Arguments about Climate Change that appeared in the March 1012 issue of Science Scope Magazine, a middle school science teacher journal sponsored by the National Science Teacher’s Association NSTA. She and Melissa Bowlds, eighth grade science teacher, were going to execute the same lesson. The lesson centers around students researching in teams of 3 and creating a paper poster project, then presenting their project to the class. We decided that Mrs. Armstrong’s class would complete an online poster project using Padlet and have the students present in small rotating groups and Mrs. Bowlds would teach the lesson as written in Science Scope.
Once the students were introduced to Padlet and had created their accounts Mrs. Armstrong needed a way to access all of the finished products. It would be too cumbersome to have each group email their final products to Mrs. Armstrong. Also, this would be very time consuming to open each email, click on the link, and then view the project. We needed to create one document that all students could access. We decided that OneDrive a component of Office 365 (Outlook) would work nicely. Every student and district employee has access to their own Outlook/Office 365 account and OneDrive allows documents to be shared and edited by others.
I created the document Climate Change Argument Link Share and shared it with the students. The students quickly access the document and began sharing their links. Once you open the document if you would like to view student projects hold the CtrL key and left click on the link. The link should open in a new tab in your web browser.
Click on the images below to access student Padlet poster.