Beyond the Board

Are you looking for a way that your students can jazz up their Science Fair boards? Well, middle school teachers have come up with a fabulous solution by going digital! Every year middle school students throughout the district are required to complete a Science Fair project as part of their final grade in Science. It is a big undertaking that requires students to spend hours outside of class developing ideas and putting everything together in order to show their understanding of the Scientific Method. Students must develop a hypothesis, gather materials, perform an experiment that will test their hypothesis, gather data and explain their results.

This year, instead of requiring the majority of students to create a board that may or may not go on to the citywide competition at Union Station, students have been given a choice to create a digital version of their typical Science Fair board.  Not only does this eliminate the need to purchase and bring in a board, it also allows the projects to be enhanced with photos and even video of the experiment conducted!

Students are using a template that was created in Google Slides (you can check it out below!). Google Classroom makes it extremely easy to distribute a copy of the template to each student so they can begin work right away. As an added bonus, Google Classroom allows the teachers to periodically check on a student’s Slides project simply by logging in to the class.  
​
Projects are due in January and we are anxious to see how students respond to the opportunity to use technology to complete them!  No longer do your students need to be "board" with their science fair projects!

Reflecting with SAMR