| | Inspirational Science Teaching Material Now Online
1 August 2007
Science teachers take note! A new, inspirational source of materials and ideas has just gone online with the upgrading of this Science on Stage website.
Of particular significance are two new sections devoted to teaching ideas and multimedia. The plethora of teaching material in these sections is largely derived from the Science on Stage 2 (SOS2) festival, which was held earlier this year in Grenoble, France.
The “Teaching Ideas” content is divided into 9 sections: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Environmental, Interdisciplinary, Mathematics, Physics, Science and Teaching Approaches. The inspirational “library” is made up of a total of 75 articles - 80% of which were collected at SOS2 – and covers a whole variety of approaches to teaching science in schools.
Teachers will find material related to the whole spectrum of educational experiences and approaches: workshops, exercises, team work, experiments, lesson plans and lectures. These are clearly labelled according to the level of the students: primary, or lower and upper secondary. All of the teaching ideas are linked to downloads, online tools or other sources of information. Although most of the materials are presented in English, there is also a selection in other languages, including French, German and Romanian.
“We enjoyed a wonderful festival where teachers from many countries presented a tremendous range of new and exciting ideas,” said Helen Page of ESA’s Education Department. “The upgraded web site makes these presentations available to teachers across Europe and it should be a valuable resource for thousands of science teachers. We also hope that it will promote the exchange of ideas and encourage innovative approaches to science education.”
Another addition to the Science on Stage web site is a comprehensive “Multimedia” section. The Image Gallery contains 150 images taken throughout the SOS2 festival as well as links to web sites from some of the countries that participated in the festival. The Video Gallery will soon be updated with a short video sequence (10-20 minutes) on each of these 6 themes: Chemistry, Electricity and Magnetism, Mechanics and Motion, The Human Body, Cutting Edge Science, and Technology, Energy and the Environment.
The Science on Stage 2 festival was held in April 2007 at the Europole Congress Centre in Grenoble, France. The international festival brought together some 500 educators from 28 European countries.
This year’s event was hosted by the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) and the Grenoble Outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), three of the EIROforum partners. The festival was also supported in part by the European Commission’s Science and Society Programme within the framework of the
NUCLEUS project and the ESTI programme.
The other EIROforum partners are the European Space Agency (ESA); the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN); the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA); and the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
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