Journal 8: Free Science Resources Online

Spotlight: Free Science Resources Online
by: Dave Nagel

This article is about where to find some free online resources for science. The article talks about three specific places to find curriculum, lesson plans, projects and other really cool and helpful resources. The three places are MIT, NASA, and the Smithsonian. The MIT site is cool. It has all kinds of demonstration videos which I found useful. I don't plan to teach science but I think this would be a really cool resource if I did have to teach science. The NASA site has cool instructional videos. The one I watched was kind of boring though. But there are some really technical tools that can be accessed through NASA's site. The Smithsonian had really cool articles and activities. I accidentally went to some of the humanities activities and found some that I really liked and would consider using in my own classroom.

How can these sites be used in the classroom?
There are numerous ways to use these sights in the classroom. The videos on the sites can be shown to the students even without a computer in the classroom. They could be saved and put on a DVD and then played in the classroom. Each site has numerous lesson plans on them which could be of immeasurable help to a new teacher. There are also links and activities for students on the sites that could be used in the classroom.

What age groups can use these sites?
All three sites are relevant to all ages K-forever. I found a lot of the stuff I was looking at to be very interesting and some of it to be far beyond my own knowledge level.