Webinar Summary: The Physics Front Digital Library Collection

Webinar Summary for

NSDL What Works Series: Enhancing and Sharing Lessons Using The Physics Front Digital Library Collection

Tuesday 1-2pm EST
Found this opportunity through Middle School Portal 2 Science and Math Pathways

This webinar was presented on ReadyTalk Conferencing with a 800 number for the audio. The Hosts for this presentation were: National Science Digital Library Resource Center, ComPADRE Physics & Astronomy Pathway, and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT).

The hour long presentation was informative, and provided some new sites, but I did not feel like this was interactive enough for me. I considered this webinar because physics is a difficult subject to teach the concrete learners of elementary school. I was hoping to get some new ideas, and new resources for the classroom. The following sites are the most influential that I perceived from the webinar:

The Physics and Astronomy Communities site is a springboard for other science information. The focus of the presentation was on the new website acting as a gateway to physics information for the classroom, ThePhysicsFront. However, when questions came up about certain materials or data the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching was always suggested as the best site. Finally the speaker noted that there is another resource similar to ThePhysicsFront called The Physics Classroom.

Since I am not a high school physics teacher, I was using this webinar as an opprotunity to broaden my perspectives and look for things that I could use as basic introductions to physics. However, I did notice that this webinar was supported by the scientific communities relating to physics and astronomy, and wondered why there were not similar sites for all of the science disciplines. I have yet to surf on that idea; maybe once I know what I will be teaching this fall.

Overall I enjoyed the opprotunity and ease of the webinar. I also appreciated that the sponsors of the new site thought it was important to host a webinar to show the many features of the site. I need to keep my eyes and ears open so I can continue to witness these new resources at their onset.