Case Study: An interview with Kris Campesi, Science Teacher, Stafford County, VA.

Kris Campesi is a veteran middle school science teacher at Stafford Middle School in Virginia. She teaches 8th grade Physical Science, for advanced as well as special needs students. She has a passion for showing special needs students that they can succeed in Science. She is also interested in helping her advanced kids take science to the highest heights! Check out the photo below of Kris on a 'Weightless Flights of Discovery' trip!

Here is more about how Kris uses Gizmos in her classroom.

How did you first hear about ExploreLearning?

When I was at a regional NSTA conference I saw the booth and stopped by. It did not take the person in the booth more than a few minutes and I was sold on how great the product was.

What were your first impressions of the site and Gizmo when you first signed up? What keeps you using ExploreLearning?

I was very impressed with how you had made the experiment/activity visually appealing but not complicated. Many of the computer modules that I had tried spent so much effort trying to make the 'lab look real' that it was very complicated to use and visually distracting. You kept the activities to the basics and made them data driven. There was good data collection and best of all, a 'do-over' ability.

I keep coming back to ExploreLearning because I noticed an interesting phenomenon--- that my students understand a concept better from the Gizmo than doing a lab. I often find that if I do the concept with the Gizmo first, then the hands on lab, they stay on task better and get to the 'conclusion' better than if they just do the lab.

What Gizmo did you have the most success (and/or fun and/or satisfaction) teaching with?

I am not sure there were any Gizmos that I have not liked. At the end of the year, I did a survey about the activities in class and this is what some of the kids said. They really liked all of the simple machine Gizmos, such as Levers, Pulleys, Ants on a Slant. They loved to make the levers go crazy and spin round and round. They had a good time with the Food Chain Gizmo also--- they finally really got the idea that everything is connected. They loved to play with it to see if they could 'kill' everything. I loved the Density Laboratory where my students had to determine the mass and volume, and then the density. The kids liked to 'play' with the Golf Range Gizmo. Mouse Genetics also really intrigued many of the students. I liked the use of independent and dependent variable with the Growing Plants Gizmo too.

How did you use the Gizmo in class?

I always do a demonstration of the Gizmo with the projector for the class. Each student then has his or her own laptop to work on. I provide detailed instructions for most Gizmos and students always have data to record from experimentation. In some cases, I have them take a picture of a data table and paste it into a Word document. Often the students at the lab table help each other to be successful with the Gizmo.

The Assessment Questions online have usually been done as 'replacement grades' which means that students can use the score from these questions to replace a homework grade they don't like.

If you've used other technology and/or teaching methods to cover this same science concept, did you find that the Gizmo helped you cover the topic more quickly/easily, less quickly/easily or about the same?

As I mentioned earlier, I feel that Gizmos help make the concepts more clear than just the hands-on labs. I believe one of the reasons is that students today are familiar with working at a computer screen. They have acquired the ability to concentrate using the visual sense and this translates over to the Gizmos.

How did the students respond to the Gizmo?

The students loved 'Gizmo Day' which we had almost every Thursday. They would be at their lockers in the morning and when they realized it was Gizmo Day they would start chanting 'GIZMO DAY.' Many students even told their parents not to make doctor's appointments during my class and some came in sick and then went home after my class.

Describe the technology setup in which you used Gizmos.

I use a projector and Smart Board (when I can get it) to demo the Gizmos before the students work on them. I also have done screen shots of Gizmo simulations and used it with my CPS (classroom performance system), which the kids call my zappers.

At the beginning of this past school year I signed my class up for the cart of 30 laptops EVERY Thursday. Most of the teachers were not even thinking about computers at this point so I got a head start! I believe there were only 3 days all year that I gave the laptops back and did not do Gizmos. I made it a priority for the year!