Generating an Argument

I believe the readings on Generating an Argument and the the Instructional Model by Sampson and Grooms will be very useful in my future teaching. I have already experimented with a lesson that follows the model some (and never knew it at the time) and had great success with it. The only thing I did not include was a poster or other choice to display the conclusion, evidence, and rationale, as suggested by the authors in their "The Science Teacher" article. (I posted the assignment link on the class wiki prior to this post.) The students loved the round-robin format of gathering evidence and ideas from other students and sharing their thoughts/ideas/work. I do a lot of labs with my middle school students and spend much of my time searching and writing new ones. Using online data will be helpful in planning/writing labs in which I do not have appropriate materials. Also, students will see real-time data and feel more involved with real science. During a lot of labs, students have so much fun collecting the data and carrying out the experiment, that they do not think about what they are collecting, why they are doing it, and what the data means. By having access to online data, students will immediately start the thinking and questioning process which is so critical.
I have not found a data set that I would like to use for our assignment this week, but some data ideas that I would like to use during the school year will be for climate data (temps, precip, snowpack, etc), predator/prey data, and motion data (still thinking about this). I am still exploring my thoughts for my classroom activity and spending time searching online data sites. As I come to some good ones, I will post them, just as classmates are doing. This is very helpful!