Wednesday, September 15, 2010

SciDo

A group of science teachers on Twitter have created #SciDo. In its current form, it's a shared Google Docs folder where science teachers upload lessons to share with others. Mike Ritzius has been the primary force here but I don't know the history behind it. It's like BetterLesson but with actual lessons in it.

There's a Flickr group for science pics. It looks like they're also forming a student blogging network. There's also talk of setting up mentoring programs for new teachers on Twitter and creating a video tutorial library. Sounds cool and definitely the more the merrier. 

If you're interested, go to http://scido.wikispaces.com/ to request GDoc access.

EngDo has also sprung up for the English teachers. My GDoc folder shows something called MathDo as well but it's currently empty. If I find out the status of that I'll update this post. I'm interested in seeing how this evolves.

Aside: I have often lamented the fact that many science teacher bloggers are actually covert edtech bloggers. They don't blog about science teaching. Every post is "101 ways to use WallWisher" and how PollAnywhere revolutionized their lectures. It's not my bag of chips so I rarely follow those blogs or the developments in the world of SMS response systems. And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm a science teacher and I have never actually blogged a science lesson.

However, SciDo was started by a group of teachers so I'm totally supportive of that.

4 comments:

  1. Hey Jason, SciDo sprang from conversations with veteran #edchat folks. We were lamenting that the talk rarely turns into anything, hence the name SciDo; first we chat, then we do.

    During a #scichat in August, a group of us were discussing better ways to collaborate and I suggested the shared file and showed them the one that I had with Tyler Rice, @MrTRice_Science, and a few colleagues on campus. There were only a few files in there at the time. Within 48 hours of that conversation, we had 40 members and over 100 resources. I was completely floored by the response.

    I then felt the need to nurture this new movement and created the wiki and suggested the sharing groups and also gave full admin rights to anyone who joined. SciDo has become a big, headless, knowledge ameoba and has been growing quite steadily ever since.

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  2. Interesting, I blog about edtech and science ed, and ed reform, but hope that I'm not one of the "covert edtech bloggers" you mention... One of my blogs is mostly edtech (http://theactiveclass.com) but http://blog.sciencegeekgirl.com is, I hope, a mix. Now you have me second-guessing myself. I hadn't realized that was a theme in the blogosphere. Thanks for sharing SciDo, that's very cool...

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  3. @Mike thanks for the story and for the hard work.

    @Stephanie I probably used the word "lamented" wrong....I google around for science blogs and they usually end up as edtech blogs. I don't know why. Science teachers are just into edtech. That's not bad. There are plenty of teachers who are looking for that kind of stuff. I'm looking for science teaching, which I think is pretty rare. Off the top of my head...Frank Noschese, Tyler Rice, John Burk, Shawn Cornally, Tracie Schroeder, Rhett Allain....blog actual teaching stuff that I feel I can use.

    Don't second guess yourself. It's GOOD that you have both because different people are looking for different thing. I admit to only subscribing to the the sciencegeekgirl blog and not the edtech one. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are the other way around.

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  4. I know that I find reading blogs interesting and useful, but I'm the type that would... So, this fall I decided to have my secondary science students read a collection of science ed blogs to see if they found them valuable. So far, the list (far from comprehensive...but you are on it) includes science ed bloggers that write mostly about teaching science. Here it is:
    http://www.netvibes.com/brunsell#Secondary_Science

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