Exploring Light: Hands-on Activities and Strategies for Teachers
€0, aangeboden door Coursera
About this course: This is an Exploratorium teacher professional development course taught by Teacher Institute staff, open to any science teacher (particularly middle or high school level) and science enthusiast. This is a hands-on workshop that explores topics and strategies teachers can use to help their students become active investigators of light. Watch a preview video (copy and paste this link into your browser): https://youtu.be/fPvT_quBVIw There are four weeks of course content, which require 2-4 hours per week. Each module builds upon the previous one, so we strongly suggest you follow the sequence we've outlined rather than skip ahead or do the course in less time. The course is designed to give you an opportunity to learn and share with others, not test what you know. There are weekly activity and reflection assignments, but these will not be graded. To receive credit for this course, you will need to complete the peer-reviewed final assignment. As a participant, you will: - Watch videos that demonstrate natural phenomena and the Exploratorium's approach to teaching and learning - Conduct personal investigations by engaging in hands-on activities based in those phenomena - Reflect and share your experience doing activities - Discuss and identify challenges and opportunities for teaching - Devise a lesson of your own based on one or more of the activities Each week, we'll look at a different light-related topic: We will start by examining human visual perception, then take a brief historical tour of our evolving scientific understanding. We’ll also look at optics and optical instruments and finish by looking at the wave nature of light. To get the most out of this experience, you'll have to try out some activities! In return, you'll get lots of valuable teaching resources, an in-depth understanding of the subject matter, and useful tips and techniques for the classroom. NOTE: This is a hands-on workshop, so you will need to buy or find materials. All of the materials required are inexpensive and should be easy to obtain, and we welcome substitutions! A separate list of materials is available for each activity.
Who is this class for: This course is designed for middle-school and high-school science teachers, but anyone interested in learning and teaching about light is welcome.
Created by:Â Â Â Exploratorium
Taught by:Â Â Â Â Zeke Kossover, Teacher in Residence
Exploratorium Teacher Institute
Taught by:Â Â Â Â Paul Doherty, PhD, Senior Staff Scientist
Teacher Institute
Taught by:Â Â Â Â Eric Muller, Senior Science Educator
Exploratorium Teacher Institute
Level
Intermediate
Commitment
4 weeks of study, 1-2 hours/week
Language
English
How To Pass
Pass all graded assignments to complete the course.
User Ratings
4.5 stars
Average User Rating 4.5See all 7 reviews
Coursework
Each course is like an interactive textbook, featuring pre-recorded videos, quizzes and projects.
Help from your peers
Connect with thousands of other learners and debate ideas, discuss course material, and get help mastering concepts.
Certificates
Earn official recognition for your work, and share your success with friends, colleagues, and employers.
About Exploratorium
The Exploratorium is a twenty-first-century learning laboratory, an eye-opening, always-changing, playful place to explore and tinker. For more than forty years, we’ve built creative, thought-provoking exhibits, tools, programs, and experiences that ignite curiosity, encourage exploration, and lead to profound learning. We use the same tools and approaches to design compelling professional development programs for teachers ranging from novice to expert, elementary to high school, and formal and informal, in fields of science, math, and engineering. To date the Exploratorium has provided in-depth, multi-year programming to thousands of educators from over 450 school districts in 47 states and in many different countries.
Syllabus
WEEK 1
Introduction to Exploring Light
Welcome to our course! This is a hands-on workshop designed for middle-school and high-school teachers and other people interested in teaching and learning about light. In this first week, we'll introduce you to our pedagogy at the <a href="http://www.explorat...Â
3 videos, 3 readings
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Week One: Perception
We don't just see with our eyes; our brain plays a big role in determining what we see. A huge percentage of the human brain is devoted to processing visual information, but we still can't make sense of everything going on around us, so we rely on certain "sho...Â
7 videos, 2 readings
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WEEK 2
Week Two: History of Our Ideas About Light
A historical timeline approach to studying light illustrates the importance of models to the advancement of science. Scientific models of light have changed over the years as more and better experiments were done. At the same time, an important skill as a teac...Â
4 videos, 2 readings
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WEEK 3
Week Three: Optics and Image Making
This week, we're exploring optics and how to make images with light. In addition to our exhibit and activity demonstrations, you'll learn how to put activities together into a lesson that helps students develop and test a mental model of how the world works. <...Â
5 videos, 2 readings
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WEEK 4
Week Four: The Wave Nature of Light
What is light? Sometimes we model it as a wave, sometimes as a particle. Light is light. Nevertheless, the wave properties of light lend themselves towards a rich array of experiments that help further our understanding.<br/><br/>This is the final week of cont...Â
7 videos, 2 readings
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Graded: Design Your Own Lesson