Get Back to Me - A Wait Time Strategy

The Teaching Channel has a vast library of videos that demonstrate and explain teaching strategies. One of the videos that I recently stumbled upon is about the "Get Back to Me" strategy. This is a strategy that can make students feel comfortable asking for more time to respond after you have given the class some wait time following a question. You can watch the short video here and find the transcript of the video here.

The Science of Cookies

I love cookies! In fact, I just had two warm chocolate chip cookies for dessert tonight. I bet that you have a student or twenty that enjoys cookies too. TED-Ed has a fun lesson that you can use to teach some science concepts through cookies. In the TED-Ed lesson about the chemistry of cookies students learn why you shouldn't eat raw dough, the temperature at which salmonella is killed, why cookies spread-out (or don't spread if the dough is not correct), and what our noses tell us about cookies. The video from the lesson is embedded below.

How Coffee Affects Your Brain

Like millions of people, I start my day by brewing coffee. On those rare days when I discover we're out of coffee at home, it can totally throw my morning out of wack. Heck, I even pick hotel rooms based on whether or not they have in-room coffee makers. In other words, I'm addicted to coffee. What is it about coffee that gives it so much power in our lives? The following short video has that answer.




Enjoy your coffee!

How Does the Brain Work? - A Series of NOVA Lessons

How Does the Brain Work? was a NOVA show that explored what scientists currently know about the human brain and the research that will help us to know more about the human brain in the future. One of the online supplements to How Does the Brain Work? is this interactive collection of images of brain scans. The collection of images, titled Mapping the Brain, allows you to choose from six imaging methods and choose the part(s) of the brain that you want to see highlighted in the scans.

Applications for Education
PBS Learning Media offers a couple of resources that can be used in conjunction with How Does the Brain Work? and Mapping the Brain. Mapping the Brain (teachers page) offers some discussion and research questions for high school students to answer as they view the images. Brain Geography is a middle school lesson in which students create models of the brain.