An Interactive Simulation of Greenhouse Effect

PhET was one of the resource that I featured in this week's Practical Ed Tech newsletter. Shortly after hitting send on that newsletter I learned about a new simulation that PhET now offers. 

The latest PhET simulation is about the greenhouse effect. The simulation can be used to help students understand the effect of greenhouse gases and clouds on sunlight, infrared radiation, and surface temperature. And students can use the simulation to compare and contrast the behavior of sunlight and infrared radiation. 

Like most PhET simulations, the Greenhouse Effect simulation can run on nearly all platforms including iPads and Chromebooks. There are also options to use it offline and to include in your own web pages as I've done below. 

A Mean PhET Simulation

PhET is one of my go-to resources for math and science teachers. Just before the Thanksgiving break (for those of us in the United States) PhET released a new simulation designed to help students understand the concept of mean. 

Mean: Share and Balance is an interactive simulation in which students are shown a series of beakers of water. They then have to estimate where the mean water level will be. The simulation can be adjusted to show as few as two beakers or as many as seven beakers. When displaying the simulation to your students you can enable or disable level indicators on the beakers and turn on or turn off prediction indicators. 

Applications for Education
Mean: Share and Balance could be a great instructional aid for elementary school or middle school lessons. One of the things that's great about PhET simulations is that most of them, including this new one, can be downloaded for use offline, shared in Google Classroom, or embedded into your website.

PhET Virtual Workshops for Teachers

PhET is one of my top resource recommendations for math and science teachers. PhET offers more than one hundred online, interactive simulations for teaching concepts in mathematics, physics, chemistry, earth science, and biology. Those simulations can be used on PhET's website and they can be embedded into your website for your students to use. 

If you're a math or science teacher who wants to take a deep dive into how to best utilize PhET's interactive simulations in your classroom, you may want to work through PhET's virtual workshops. The workshops include videos recorded at in-person PhET workshops along with practice activities and resource handouts for teachers. 

PhET offers a workshop specifically for math teachers who have computers for every student in their classroom. That workshop is roughly five hours long. There is another workshop that provides a comprehensive overview of everything that PhET offers and the ways in which the simulations can be used in your classroom. That workshop is roughly twenty-one hours long.

PhET Releases Ten Updated Simulations With Interactive Descriptions

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen this news but it's worth sharing here as well. PhET now has ten simulations that include interactive descriptions. This makes the simulations accessible to students who rely on screen readers to access the web. 

Read PhET's announcement here. 

We are excited to formally announce that 10 sims now have an Interactive Description feature!

This feature provides a fully-described interactive experience for learners who access our simulations while using screen reader software.

See them all here:https://t.co/Xv2Kf9F2CZ pic.twitter.com/rjq1OtLuKV

— PhET Sims (@PhETsims) February 21, 2022

This brings the total of PhET simulations that have some type of accessibility feature to 33. That's fourteen more than when I wrote about PhET's accessible simulations last fall.

For those who aren't familiar with PhET, it is a service that provides free interactive math and science simulations covering topics in physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and mathematics. Many of the simulations can be included in PowerPoint presentations and embedded into Google Sites. Additionally, PhET offers lesson plans that incorporate their simulations into remote math and science lessons.