How Do TPF Tools Work?
The filing cabinet is a place for users to save, organize, and annotate resources. The link to the personal filing cabinet is in the upper right corner as shown in Figure 10. In the filing cabinet, a teacher can create folders and sub-folders for storing materials from the TPF.
Items are added to the filing cabinet through a list generated by searching or browsing. Items in the filing cabinet can also be annotated or moved to different folders. Citations are also generated for folders.
Figure 10. Example filing cabinets
Discussion Forums
The Discussion Forums are tools for teachers, mentors, students, and other users to communicate and share ideas and common interests. They offer a place for new teachers to connect with each other and to ask questions. See Figure 11. The TPF filters for content. Discussion questions and suggestions are forwarded to the editor’s email. Only registered users can access the forums.
Figure 11. Discussion forums.
Other Features of TPF: Image, Lesson Plan, and Featured Items
Additional features found on TPF include lesson plans, as well as featured images and items. Registered users are able to access the archives (see Figure 12). In addition, mentors will be able to use their own lesson plans, simulations, and other creative materials as models in TPF. The TPF editorial staff will review, process, and add these exemplary teacher-made materials to the collection.
Figure 12. Features on TPF
Constructing a Lesson: An Example Vignette
TPF resources are intended to help teachers to enrich students’ experiences as they learn physics concepts. Acknowledging common needs among various science community members, special care is taken to suggest and organize access to physics resources separately and appropriately for elementary, middle school, and high school teachers, as well as their students. The following is an example of a possible situation in which a teacher might use TPF to construct a lesson.
Susan is a new middle school science teacher who will be teaching a lesson on Newton’s Laws next week. She has searched the web for good materials and found a detail page on TPF as shown in Figure 13 below.
Figure 13. Detail page of items on TPF
She notices that she can follow the link to look at resources and also notices that these materials are appropriate for middle or high school students. Susan decides to visit the Physical Science K-8 menu on the home page to search for some simulations to support this unit for her students. She then selects “Forces” from the topic list and “Newton’s First Law and Inertia” from the unit elements available. She then decides to investigate the “Inertia Game” item and believes that it is a nice simulation aimed at an appropriate grade level and ties to appropriate standards and benchmarks. Although she feels confident that these materials will work well with her lesson on Newton’s First Law of Motion, TPF also allows her to contact her mentor. Through the shared files in her filing cabinet they can collaborate on her choices.
Sharing Resources: Contributing to TPF
There are many ways that users can contribute to TPF. Users can share appropriate courses and categories. Citation information is included with existing resources so that users can make suggestions about specific resource items. The filing cabinet allows mentors to point other users toward resources as shown in Figure 10. Teachers, educators, and physicists sharing their best resources and links with new and experienced teachers contribute to TPF community. Figure 14 details how a user goes about submitting a new item to TPF.
Figure 14. Submitting content—suggesting TPF materials
TPF editor manages a broad spectrum of digital content by working with other ComPADRE editors, outside projects, and science organizations to provide a coherent service. To help achieve this goal, TPF collection works to comply with existing national and international projects standards, such as those created by the NSDL, the Open Archives Initiative, or the federal accessibility guidelines.
TPF is committed to providing the most current resources and up-to-date materials possible in order to enhance physics and physical science teaching at all levels. We are dedicated to improving physics and physical science instruction by providing community-building through our collections. Future updates will include more standards alignment and concordance, links to special topics blogs and NSTA webinars, and contributions by our new associate editors. A mentoring project for new teachers is planned along with a mentor-training area. New wikis, blogs and web seminar features are also coming soon.
Other ComPADRE collections can be found at http://www.ComPADRE.org as shown in Figure 15.
Figure 15. ComPADRE portal
Our Editorial Staff
ComPADRE started from the AAPT's Physical Sciences Resource Center, designed and developed by Warren Hein while he was Associate Executive Officer of the AAPT. Bruce Mason is the PI for the entire ComPADRE Pathways Project. The ComPADRE Project Manager is Caroline Hall. Lyle Barbato is the lead programmer and Matt Rigsbee is the web artist and programmer. TPF managing editor is Cathy Mariotti Ezrailson; associate editors include Trina Cannon and Mike Jabot. For more information on ComPADRE visit http://thephysicsfront.org or contact the editors. Watch for subsequent articles on specific best practices in teaching physics and physical science using this digital library.
