My goodness! Has it been a year already since our last update announcement?? Like last summer’s update, I once again have much to report. I’ll do my best to keep it short and to the point. Toward that, let’s use a bulleted list:
• Biology Videos! Courtesy of our biology co-authors our biology video program is off the ground and flying. These videos are specifically for our integrate science courses, but they will lay the foundation for a Conceptual Biology course we anticipate releasing for the 2019-2020 school year. Stay tuned!
• At-Home Chemistry Labs! Look to our labs page here at LearnScience.Academy and you’ll see we have the “Beyond the Lab” manual for physics, courtesy of Stephanie Blake of Ozarks College in Missouri. The equipment for performing these meaningful labs is available within your household or a local discount store. For this upcoming 2018-2019 school year we have a similar manual featuring chemistry labs, courtesy of Brandon Burnett of Weber State University in Utah. Just like Stephanie’s manual, very affordable: Free! Though a small contribution to help pay it forward is greatly appreciated.
• Support for Co-ops! We recently built a support site very similar to LearnScience.Academy, but dedicated to the high school instructor working with a group of students on an “instructor-led” Conceptual Academy course. This site is: ConceptualScience.com. Fancy domain name. 🙂
• Homework Practice Sessions! Oh boy, there so much to talk about here. Briefly, this summer we’re launching a novel “encouragement-based” automated homework system. We created a new page here at LSA for the full description. One thing not mentioned on that page is as follows:
We are big fans of team-based learning. What we are releasing this summer is the Homework Practice Sessions – Phase 1. This was built with an architecture that will accommodate Phase 2 to be released summer 2019. With Phase 2, students will be able to work together in teams of 5 members or less, in real-time, on a single Homework Practice Session. The short answer question of Phase 1, will be transformed to a forum where students can discuss with each other a possible answer before ever seeing the multiple choice version, which they will then subsequently vote upon. Team-based learning! What this means is that a homeschool student from Texas can work on an HPS with another homeschool student in, say, Oregon, and another in North Carolina, provided they are signed up for the same Conceptual Academy course and are close together in their progress through the syllabus.
From all your past support, Phase 1 of the HPS is now a reality and a super addition to all our Conceptual Academy courses for the 2018-2019 academic year. With your continued support we look forward to having our dream of Phase 2 in place by summer 2019. Thank you!
Of course, please write to us directly to Support@ConceptualAcademy.com for any questions you may have. We look forward to hearing from you.
Good chemistry,
John
P.S. A shout out to my fantastic students at Weber State University some of whom you see in the image of this blog. As per my summer 2017 blog, note how once again there are zero students facing my way during our “lecture”. How awesome is that. 🙂