Teaching with Simulations and Digital Tools — Professional Development

The charter curriculum’s lessons include guided activities in free simulators and tools: PhET Interactive Simulations, CODAP, GeoGebra, Desmos, JupyterLite, federal science data portals, and Knight Lab’s timeline and map builders. This course covers what the subject guides do not. It explains how to run those activities so the tool drives reasoning rather than clicking, how to assess what students do in them, and how to keep them working on real school networks and devices.

Module 1 covers teaching with any tool: a guided-inquiry routine that fits the curriculum’s five-part units, assessing tool work, and access, accounts, privacy and licensing. Modules 2-7 take one tool family each, with setup, the teaching moves that make it work, common failures and troubleshooting. Each module can be assigned on its own: a science teacher can take Module 2 on PhET without the rest.

The subject teacher guides point here for how-to; this course points back to the subject guides for how each activity fits its unit.