Practical 1 in the History in STEM practical series, looking at how students can do an experiment completed over 2000 years ago to get their own reasonably accurate value for the circumference of the Earth. Requires minimal equipment and very little time to get the data, however, does need you to be able to work with another school in a** different city** to get all the data points required to complete the calculation. Good for schools with a “sister school” in another state or country.
More about the History in STEM practical Series
This free sample is a preview of the History in STEM practical series, a set of practicals designed to bring quality cross-curricula material to STEM subjects, that help students to explore and discover phenomena normally taught, while getting a glimpse into the history of its development.
In addition, a number of the practicals give the students the opportunity to play “Mythbusters”, looking at a number of different methods and having to reason why one or the other was the more likely or useful method.
From Ancient Greece to Vikings, China to the Golden age of the Muslim empire and beyond to India, the series takes a look at some of the most important STEM achievements throughout history.
There is a plan for 40 of these such practicals in this series, so, if you liked this one, consider looking at some of the others, or check out some of the bundles available.
Easily generate unique comments for each of your students with this straight forward, easy to use excel sheet. Use the comments already loaded or input your own to quick and easily generate report comments that are individualised. See steps below for how to use.
Go to Grades Tab and Insert student names and gender (use capital F or M to indicate which pronouns will be used in the comment)
Go to Sentences. I have provided you with some examples of what you can use. You can alter what is there, and there is space for your to add more. If you need more sentence ideas, there is plenty available online which you can use as a template. Just google, “Report Comment examples” and you should come up with thousand of options. When inputting the sentences, you should see the key to the right for inputting pronouns or other data. For example, “%name% has shown that while heshe is capable, heshe has work to do to meet expectations.” will replace %name% with the name of the student and “heshe” will change to he or she based on the gender input.
Before you begin creating your individualised comments, you should print off the “Sentences” sheet. It will make it easier to see all the options you have available.
Now you are ready to create your comments. Go to the input tab and for each section insert a number between 1 and 25. This will insert the corresponding sentence that you created in the Sentences sheet. If you want to mention an assignment, then place the name of the assignment in the assignment column and it will insert it into the comment for you.
When you are done, go back to the Grades tab and you should be able to see an overview of the comments for your students. If you prefer a cleaner view, you can go to the “Individual Student View Report Card” and type the number of each student in individually to have a closer look and check that you are happy.
The final step is to copy the cells over to a Word document or wherever else you want the writing to go and you are done.
If you don’t want to use my comments, there is a little time to be taken in the initial set up, but once you have the sentences in place, comment writing takes a matter of minutes rather than hours. I would even recommend having a separate list of sentence for each year level, however, that is something that you can work on with time.
I have also attached an Email generator as a bonus. It has space for up to 15 preset emails that you can set. I have again left some examples, but you can alter them and create your own. When making your own emails, don’t forget to use the key to the right for anything you want replaced.