All resources in DLI SOL Working Group

Facebook Digital Literacy Library

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Lessons designed by experts to help students develop skills needed to navigate the digital world, critically consume information and responsibly produce and share content. The source touts that they are designed to be interactive and engaging, these lessons involve group discussion, activities, quizzes, and games that have been built in consultation with teens. They can be used either collectively or individually in the classroom.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Module

Author: Facebook

Design Your Own Experiment : a Health & Biology Interdisciplinary Learning Experience

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Design Your Own Experiment : a Health & Biology Interdisciplinary Learning Experience The Heart of Scientific Literacy: understanding scientific investigation & experimental design Purpose:The purpose of this activity is for you to explore the process of scientific investigation through a health lens.  You will consider ways in which data is collected to inform your health and well being.  You will create and carry out a valid experimental design in the fitness room or small gym.  Your experimental design must yield reliable data.  You will analyze the  data to make a claim and support it with evidence. In short, you will carry out a scientific investigation from start to finish to grow in scientific literacy and make informed decisions about your health. 

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment

Authors: Bridget Mariano, Kristan Honaker

Experimental Design Process Skills

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This activity is designed to be a self-paced activity to review students on the parts of Experimental Design while at home or in the classroom. There is a simple experiment for the students to complete to generate and collect data and a second example in which they design their own experiment and collect data. They are then led through the process of analyzing their data and writing a conclusion.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lecture Notes, Lesson

Author: Jane Brown

Design a Parachute

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After a discussion about what a parachute is and how it works, students create parachutes using different materials that they think will work best. They test their designs, and then contribute to a class discussion (and possible journal writing) to report which paper materials worked best.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Remix

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This resource incorporates the 5E instructional model, allowing student engagement and collaboration through an interactive scaffolding activity. The literacy connection section of the resource incorporates literacy across the mathematics curriculum and the design challenge section allows students to think outside the box as they apply their own knowledge, skills, and abilities to elaborate on the final product. Section 1 - The literacy connection section allows teachers to use this activity in a whole class setting and benefits students as it allows them to explore the story sequencing of the lifecycle of the caterpillar in an active and creative environment. This activity encourages active listening skills and student ownership as it encompasses the 5E instructional model. Section 2  - The design challenge is an enrichment activity, where students are able to work as a team and construct an explanation for their design challenge. Allowing student ownership in the early ages of the design model enables student accountability in the learning process. Original resource - This is a remix of The Very Hungry Caterpillar from Illustrative Mathematics resource https://tasks.illustrativemathematics.org/content-standards/tasks/1150. 

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson, Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Sandy Chalke

Exploring Mars

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In this unit, students study the rovers Spirit and Opportunity and their remarkable missions to Mars. Through a combination of reading, analyzing images and photographs, and participating in engineering and design labs, students will begin to understand the complexity, preparation, and diligence involved in space missions. Students will grapple with why the engineering and design process, particularly continually planning, trying, and evaluating, is a crucial part of a successful mission. This unit also allows students to make connections between content learned in math and content learned in previous science units, solidifying the importance and value of STEM. It is our hope that this unit inspires students to explore engineering and STEM not only in space but in the world around them. In this unit, students build their skills in consuming scientific and technical texts. Students will practice explaining the connection between two or more scientific ideas or concepts in a text. Additionally, students will be challenged to draw on and integrate information from two or more texts in order to describe a scientific idea, concept, or process in depth. This unit also continues the study of point of view and analyzing how the point of view influences what and how information is presented to a reader. The Mighty Mars Rover is written to captivate and engage a reader, while the NASA press releases are written to inform the public of the progress and findings of the Mars rover missions. Students will be challenged to compare and contrast the point of view of each text and the strategies each author uses based on the point of view and desired audience. Since this is the culminating unit of the course, all other informational standards will be spiraled throughout the unit.

Material Type: Assessment, Homework/Assignment, Lesson Plan

Using Geometry to Design Simple Machines

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This video is meant to be a fun, hands-on session that gets students to think hard about how machines work. It teaches them the connection between the geometry that they study and the kinematics that engineers use -- explaining that kinematics is simply geometry in motion. In this lesson, geometry will be used in a way that students are not used to. Materials necessary for the hands-on activities include two options: pegboard, nails/screws and a small saw; or colored construction paper, thumbtacks and scissors. Some in-class activities for the breaks between the video segments include: exploring the role of geometry in a slider-crank mechanism; determining at which point to locate a joint or bearing in a mechanism; recognizing useful mechanisms in the students' communities that employ the same guided motion they have been studying.

Material Type: Lecture

Authors: Daniel D. Frey, MIT BLOSSOMS

7.G Designs

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This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: Find the area and perimeter of the colored part of each of the six figures below. The purple, blue, orange, red, and green figures are composed of smal...

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

DIY Weather Tools

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This activity would be a great start to a unit on weather.  Ideally, students should create their weather instruments and use them to gather data over a period of at least several days, looking for trends in the weather such as temperature and cloud cover.  Show the weather PowerPoint to introduce weather tools and terms.  Divide students into teams of 3 or 4 to create one of the tools.  The following day, students should use the weather tool they create to take and record measurements using the “Weather Data Sheet."  Repeat this process several times over several days (or even weeks). 

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Erin Brown

VT PEERS: Outerspace Breakout Boxes

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Lesson Length: 1-2 hoursGrade Level: 6-8Students learn about relationships between earth and space including elements of our solar system, gravity, escape velocity, and space exploration though a breakout box experience. They solve clues about space and conditions needed to support life on a planet and perform tests related to space travel. Clues for opening locks on the breakout box are purposefully challenging to simulate the struggle engineers often grapple with when problem solving.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1657263. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive, Lesson, Lesson Plan, Visual Media

Author: VT PEERS

Book 5, Music Across Classrooms: Visual Arts. Chapter 1, Lesson 1: Designing A Band Logo

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In this lesson, students explore band logos as examples of graphic design, and consider how logos derive meaning through association with the bands they symbolize. Guided by a handout that introduces Five Principles of Effective Logo Design, students study images of band logos and analyze their effectiveness. Armed with a new sense of what might make logos effective, students then design logos for their own fictitious, or real, bands.

Material Type: Full Course

Torpedo Designing Contest

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This project is a classroom investigation where students design a chemical torpedo out of pipettes, baking soda and vinegar to travel down a rain gutter. While working on the project the students will have to analyze their design, interpret their success and failures, adapt their creation and compete against other students in distance and velocities of their launched torpedo.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment, Lesson Plan

Author: Lance Kuehn