Hunter Hall is a 9th grade Earth Science teacher at Stuarts Draft High School, a rural public school in Augusta County, Virginia. Mr. Hall first discovered ExploreLearning Gizmos during the COVID-19 pandemic to give students hands-on learning opportunities. “The coronavirus really caught us by surprise in our rural community, and we really had no standard means of providing work to our students during the pandemic.”
Gizmos made a big difference for his students by allowing them to explore science concepts from a distance. “Gizmos truly ended up being a savior during that time! The large library of student explorations, or labs, made it possible for me to still incorporate lab-based learning into hybrid/virtual instruction. The clear and concise instructions on student copies, along with answer keys for the teacher to provide support with, made it easy for virtual students to be just as successful in completing the labs as hybrid students who were doing them in the classroom on Chromebooks.”
After returning to the classroom, Mr. Hall says that he “ quickly realized that many of the Gizmos Student Explorations are better activities than the ones I had been doing with my students pre-pandemic.”
Now, Mr. Hall uses Gizmos alongside his in-person labs and to provide alternatives to students. “I feel like I have a balanced use of labs with manipulatives and labs that are better completed on Gizmos. Virtual labs are also a great tool for students who were absent on a hands-on lab day. I can also create a related lab on Gizmos and have them complete it on their own time rather than us having to stay after hours to make up for the missed lab in person.”
In that way, Gizmos are always able to accomplish my desired outcomes
For Mr. Hall, being able to customize how his students use Gizmos is key. “ Another great feature of Gizmos is that I can manipulate them to accomplish my desired learning outcomes for my students. Sometimes I take a Gizmo that is meant to be an entire lab, and I cut it down into a smaller, briefer activity. But, other times, I combine some of the smaller labs into one and have the students access the various Gizmos from the class home page for a bigger assignment. In that way, Gizmos are always able to accomplish my desired outcomes.”
Mr. Hall says, “I would say that my "Top 3" favorite Gizmos labs are: Density Laboratory, Mineral Identification, and Ocean Mapping. The Mineral Identification lab has become a permanent portion of my Minerals Lab where students do part of the lab hands-on and the other part on Gizmos in a blended fashion. The Density Laboratory also is great for helping teach my students the relationship between the density of water and why objects sink or float in it. My students like doing the Triple Beam Balance Gizmo instead of working with the real balances, since they think they're a bit of an "old school" tool.”
He recently tried the Half-Life Gizmo in his class and shared “that lab does a much better job of teaching radioactive decay than any assignment I have done prior to Gizmos, and it quickly progresses students from the broad concept of half-life to actually conducting carbon dating in the last section of the lab.”
Mr. Hall adds, “ My advice to other teachers who use Gizmos is that it is far more customizable than you may think! Spend some time playing around with the labs, and I'm willing to bet you can make it work for the specific lab you're wanting to do.“
Hunter Hall has been teaching 9th grade at Stuarts Draft High School for 6 years, and this is his 7th year teaching in total. He has taught elementary and high school and is certified PreK-6th in all subjects and high school earth science.