Explore resources, tools, and strategies for teaching science. Discover activities to spark curiosity and enhance hands-on learning in the classroom.
“Digital storytelling empowers students to show their understanding of content,” says Dr. Bruce Ellis. Imagine if you could use it for science learning. In my previous blog entry, I shared how important it is for students to do the following on a regular basis in science:
- Observe phenomena, experiment, and then take notes.
- Have students revise their notes and clarify vocabulary.
- Reflect about the material, asking original questions and sharing what they have learned.
In this blog entry, I’d like to introduce you to a new digital storytelling tool that students can use for reflection. Before I share about the digital tool, let’s explore why it’s needed.
Why Reflect?
Do students understand what their learning means for them as individuals? Jack Mezirow says that this is quite important. Reflections we value are critical for everyone, not only students. Mezirow says:
A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the meaning of our experience.
How do we scaffold that understanding opportunity (reflection) for our students? Arthurs L. Costa and Bena Kallick write that we enhance reflection when we:
- Ponder our learning with others
- Link current experience to previous learning (a.k.a. scaffolding)
- Draw forth cognitive and emotional information from several sources
- Act upon and process information, synthesizing and evaluating data
- Apply what we’ve learned to novel situations or contexts (source: Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind)
As a blogger, reflecting on how ideas strange to me connect to my own prior experience are powerful. I gain a deeper understanding of new learning, more so than when I just read. The benefits of student reflection on learning are more affective than cognitive. It also aids with metacognition.
What about reflection in science class? This phased model assists students in learning vital science practices:
Source: Basir, M.A. (2019). Learning about science practices:
Concurrent reflection on classroom investigations and scientific works.
Innovations is Science Teacher Education, 4(2).
A Model for Reflection
As you can see in the diagram above, there are various suggested phases of reflecting for science. You can also find a model to follow when engaging in reflection.
To make it easier for you to adapt for your own use, please find a Google Doc template linked for you:
Now let’s take a look at a new tool.
Introducing Twig Create
Twig Create makes it easy to create videos for free. It is available to teachers, giving them access to stock video clips that include curated content. To these videos, teachers and students can add text, music, and voiceovers. See more features online, along with pricing for schools.
Twig Create is a student-centered multimedia-creation experience. It encourages students to unleash their creativity. Twig Create combines easy-to-use video editing tools and activities. These activities align to core content areas. Twig Create promotes agency, creativity, and inquiry in all students.
Terrific Twig Create Creations
Curious about some of the exciting work students are engaging in? Here’s one example from a grade 4-6 teacher, Hayley Thomas. The video below shows a student reflection for sixth grade science:
Find more examples online at the Twig Create website. Students can use Twig Create to summarize and share their learning, as shown in these videos. This digital tool combines the reflection process with the power of digital storytelling and is a strategic way to help students better master and retain scientific content.
“We come to know ideas, and then we can be asked to relate and extend them. This leads to conceptual understanding, which can in turn become a new idea. These conceptual understandings form the ‘coat hangers’ on which we interpret and assimilate new ideas, and relate and extend them” says 
What Is Flip?
Students begin learning observational skills in science starting in kindergarten. Though the skill is not as robust or refined as what a high school student may demonstrate, there is still great value in having them engage in observing the world around them to start taking notice of how things work. Observation is a foundational science skill that leads to communication, classification, measurement, inferencing, and predictions.
In Flip, create a grid for observations. Each topic in this grid will show a photo or video that the student is to observe and describe. Depending on the level of skill, you can require students to use previously learned vocabulary in their responses. If you want students to use words from a given word bank that you have developed for them, create the document and add it as a topic attachment to the topic. You can reference this word bank in multiple topics by adding the link to each topic. If you have a rubric to guide the students in their work, add the rubric as another topic attachment; for younger students, you may need to record a video showing the rubric while you are reading it aloud.
Go to 
Begin by creating a grid to hold your inferencing topics. As done above, create a standard set of instructions for your students. You can go to ,
Pixabay -(
USB Microscope – Consider purchasing a USB microscope that you can connect to your device in order to take photos and videos of actual materials in your classroom…or on fieldtrips! Read the details carefully as some microscopes will work with some devices but not all…such as Android phones/tables, PC computers, and Mac computers but not iPhones or iPads. If you need a microscope that connects with your iPhone or iPad, be sure that it explicitly states that it connects. Likewise if you are wanting to connect the microscope to a Chromebook. If it is not clearly stated, look for a link in which you can ask the seller or locate that microscope on another seller’s website to see what information they provide. 
