Lenny Gonzalez
Teenagers love to sleep with their cell phones under their pillows.
Knowing this, high school chemistry teacher Tanya Katovich from Palatine, Illinois, decided to leverage it as a way to get her students interested in conducting a science experiment. “For a student, the second you bring up a cell phone, that’s fascinating to them,” she says.
Connecting to a radioactivity lab clear across the globe — a Geiger counter in Australia — Katovich’s students decided to find out whether their cell phones are frying their brains.
“I want to give [my students] access to instruments that I’ll never be able to afford in my classroom,” she says.
I asked Katovich, who teaches at Schaumburg High School, her what her students found out at the recent Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education conference. Watch the video below, and read the entire transcript at end of the post.