From Dick Larson
Welcome to our first STEM Pals Newsletter! We hope that you find it useful and that this is the first of many. Several of you have sent us materials for inclusion in this Newsletter, and we are grateful for that. You will see your contributed materials as you peruse the Newsletter. While barely six weeks ago, it seems that our two-day MIT STEM Best-Practices Workshop was long ago! So that we do not forget our discussions, the summary remarks that you all provided in the two Friday Breakout Group sessions can be found here. As I read the breakout notes, the following points stand out: Read more.

From Rick McMaster
The U.S. Departments of Education and Defense announced the launch of “Learning Registry,” an open-source community and technology designed to improve the quality and availability of learning resources in education. Rather than creating an alternative destination to existing websites, Learning Registry is a communication system that allows existing educational portals and online systems to publish, consume, and share important information about learning resources with each other and the public, while respecting the privacy of individual users. Read More.

From Reen Gibb and Megan Rokop
After our very invigorating STEM conference (thank you for inviting me) I wanted an action plan to implement at Westwood HS.

Megan and I met so we could brainstorm on how this could happen. Here are four very specific strategies that Megan, the creative and dynamic thinker, came up with: Read more.

For STEM-Related Updates, Visit: BLOSSOMS Twitter

From Cora Beth Abel
Many of you were interested in our science fair activities. Below is information about plans for the Massachusetts State High School Science and Engineering Fair. It will take place Thursday, May 3 - Saturday, May 5 at MIT. Students in grades 9-12 from all Massachusetts public, private and parochial schools—as well as home-schooled students—are eligible to enter through their schools. In addition, the Massachusetts Middle School Science and Engineering Fair will be held Saturday, June 2, 2012 at Worcester Technical High School. Read more.

From Ian Waitz via Chad Galts
MIT has launched a new project around a simple idea: K12 educators and MIT students should be working together. Educators should visit the MIT-K12 Video Project website to submit ideas for experiments or demonstrations they would like to see an MIT student perform and explain in a short video (5-10 minutes long). MIT students can then "check out" these assignments (in the library sense of that phrase) — or they can come up with their own ideas and check them out themselves. Read more.

Let us hear from you in January!  Enjoy the holidays.