Week 10 Review: Science Fix
For this week’s educational blog review, I decided to take a step out of my content area (and comfort zone), and explore advances in other areas of secondary education. And I was glad that I did. I found the blog Science Fix, created by a middle school science teacher named Darren Fix with some uniquely creative approaches to teaching a wide variety of concepts. Unfortunately this website has not been updated very frequently over the past few years, yet I found it to be a wealth of ideas and inspiration, even for myself as a future English/journalism instructor.
Fix’s videos, which range from a few minutes to about ten, demonstrate experiments and presentations for students and teachers to get them thinking about concepts like the scientific method, heat energy, and the solar system, or sometimes just to review an educational product like the UFO Solar Balloon. My favorite video out of the handful that I watched, was Solar System Scale Model. This project blew me away in terms of usefulness and creativity. Fix created a mile-long model of the solar system, 100% to scale, for his students to walk along and/or view on Google Maps. Using a volleyball for the sun and various nuts for planets, he imitated the immense size of our solar system for his students to experience. I feel as though I learned as much from this short video as the middle schoolers, and if I were a science teacher I would definitely use it and possibly even replicate his ideas in my classroom.
Fix also came up with a video style that I was very impressed with, although I definitely think it could be fine-tuned further. He began a series called “Teachers Being Students,” in which he walks his fellow teachers through his classroom concepts with experiments and models to show his students in order to encourage them to think out loud, to make mistakes, and to work toward bonding as a school. I would like to someday apply this idea to my own classroom, perhaps by asking teachers to comment on or question our readings, or just to share their own favorite books in a monthly video.