The digital student experience of Amplify Science 6–8 includes a suite of features, including:
Student view of the curriculum platform: The curriculum platform hosts all activity instructions, media, links to simulations, science articles, lesson-specific vocabulary, and more. In fact, the log in, navigation, and content is very similar to what you see when you log into the curriculum with your teacher account!
Digital apps like Simulations and Modeling Tools: Students use digital apps that serve as venues for exploration, data collection, and/or expressing their ideas. Students will be able to access digital Modeling Tools from the lessons in which they’re used. Simulations can also be accessed from the associated lessons, as well as from the Programs & Apps menu in students’ Amplify accounts.
Amplify Library: Students can read and annotate science articles in the Amplify Library.
Futura Workspace: Students will use a faux inbox called the Futura Workspace app to complete work during the Engineering Internship units.
To give you a sense of how all of these features come together for students within the digital curriculum, below we’ll show you a sample lesson from the student point-of-view.
Logging in and getting to a lesson:
The method students use to log in is particular to your district. If you don’t know which option to have students use (e.g. Google, Clever, etc.), please check with your IT department.
Once logged in, the quickest way for students to get to the lesson you want them to be working on is via the “Assigned” section of MyWork.
Students can also get to the appropriate lesson by manually navigating the same way that you do: by choosing the unit, scrolling to the chapter, then choosing the lesson.
You can also opt to use the Start Class feature.
The Lesson Brief:
Students’ view of the Lesson Brief is very similar to the teacher’s view of it.
Right click and select "open image in a new tab" to make each image larger.
Lesson activities:
The first activity of every lesson is a warm-up (with the exception of lessons containing unit assessments). Note the “Hand-In” button at the bottom right corner. Student work autosaves, but in order for it to be sent to your Classwork app, the student needs to press “Hand-In” once they have completed the activity.
Tip: you can always see what the student view of an activity is by collapsing the instructional information using the “Instructional Guide” icon in your teacher account.
After the warm-up, the number and type of activities in a lesson will vary. In this particular lesson, the second activity is a hands-on investigation. The student-view of the activity includes safety information, instructions for carrying out the investigation, and a set of reflection questions for them to fill out.
Next is Activity 3, a Sim activity. This and all other Sim activities contain a direct link to the Sim above the activity instructions. When students click the link it will open in a new tab.
The next activity in the student view is Activity 4. However, in the teacher view of the lesson, shown below, there is an extra activity between Activity 3 and 4 called, “Playing Zooming in on Phase Change.” The “T” listed in front of the activity name tells you that students will not see that activity in their view of the lesson. Typically, this occurs when a video or teacher modeling is called for. In this case, the teacher plays a short video (which the student can re-watch later, if needed, by referring to the video file in the Digital Resources area of the Lesson Brief).
After the teacher plays the video in the “T” activity, they and their students move forward to Activity 4, which features a discussion. Notice that there are 2 pages of this activity and students may need to be reminded to move to the second page or hit “next” when it is time (the Instructional Guide will tell you when this is necessary).
In the last activity of the lesson, students use a digital Modeling Tool on pages 1 and 2, before annotating and responding to a science article on page 3.
The student can input annotations and make use of the audio feature on the article from right there in the activity itself, but a link to the article in the full digital library is also provided in case the student would prefer to interact with it there.
An important thing to note is you cannot see students’ annotations if they are done only in the library. In order for you to see them, the student needs to navigate back to the activity where the article is embedded (which will populate with the annotations made in the library), and hit “Hand In.”
What happens to the handed in work?
When students submit work by clicking Hand In, it shows up immediately in your Classwork app. Learn more about how to find and access student work here. Students, meanwhile, can access their work by navigating back to the activities themselves, or by referring to the various tabs found in their MyWork space. Read more about that here.