download-9, a photo by Lori-kay Tucker on Flickr.

A black and whit by Gloria

How do you Flip a classroom? You start posting your lecture electronically and by a bunch of ipod touches. The Flipped Classroom is a very interesting concept. I have been watching the videos at their site.  I like how both of these teachers are using this technology in a face to face classroom to increase one on one interaction with students. It makes me ponder how to do this in my video classes?

Q: Where do damaged organelles go?

A: to the ER!

I like to start my class with openers. Some days I will post a joke or a puzzle and some days its a few pop quiz questions. I am starting a to horde away these goodies and thought I might share them here.

Identify the Image – Each week Nikon posts a small world image and challenges the world to correctly identify the subject.

Online interactives from the Bronx Zoo – small simple online activities that will be great for introducing related lessons.

I also like to play goofy science songs to start class. One of my favorite is They Might be Giants. They have good music videos that come with their CD from itunes.  D. Art has some great tunes and lyrics for sale on his web site.

There are a lot of excellent podcasts for science as well. The Ecogeeks, Terra, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. I find most of my podcasts on itunes and download them so that they play efficiently during class.

Jokes are also fun. Sometimes the humor is a little above my class, but it gets them thinking. You can find a lot of jokes and music lyrics by using google searches too. I am collecting my joke links on delicious if you want a few links.

I am always careful to credit my sources when I use these resources. It sets a good example for the students too.

Here are some great resources that are new to me for teaching biology online. They are flash files and pretty hefty so make sure you have the bandwidth to support them. But nice!

A new initiative for the team is the creation of a Modern Biology course for the Open Learning Initiative (OLI), at Carnegie Mellon University, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The OLI project is devoted to developing ?cognitively informed?, and openly available, online courses and course materials.

If my students love their iphones as much as I do, then we are crazy not to leverage these mobile tools. You might think that students in rural Alaska wouldn’t have a lot of cell phones.  Thanks to a rural program sponsored by GCI most of my students can afford to own their own phone. Most of them have them and use them. Not all of them are smart phones, but I suspect they will have them soon.

There are several apps that illustrate the potential of hand held technology. Today I learned about Google’s Sky Map App.

Wired magazine has a great list of their top 22 applications in a recent post. Pasco has developed a bluetooth interface for their spark probes. Please email me if you have other good apps. Here’s another blog post on life science apps.

I haven’t posted to this blog in a long time. I have been more preoccupied with getting my lessons organized and sorting through resources for each of these. It seems to be a never ending process.  I am also participating in our district curriculum review process and we talked about sharing resources. This blog is becoming my repository of links. I am updating my pages to reflect specific resources that I use throughout the year.

But I also use delicious a lot. It is so easy to tag a site. Though choosing the right tag can be tricky. Sometimes I forget how I tagged an item or I have too many items with this tag.  I’ll post my tag cloud here for awhile.  Feel free to become apart of my network. I need to get better at searching my network tags too.

Here is a great site for those who are struggling with the development of cloze questions in moodle.

http://www.papiamentu.info/admin/cloze

A great tool for jazzing up your Moodle or web sites with a review. Have your students create their own games for each other!

Click here for full screen version

I know a lot of my geek friends twitter. I have personally never seen a niche for this application in my toolbox. I am still overwhelmed by the world of facebook. But many science programs are making their appearance in twitter now. The Mercury Messenger project has a whole team twittering updates as this space probe slings through the gravitational force of Mercury and captures new data about this mysterious planet. I friended the crew through face book where they have general info. But they noted that twitter was where the live updates would happen.

Today I got a message about a snow depth project that will fit in nicely with our permafrost monitoring. It’s called the snow tweets project.  I just may have to twitter for this.

Dear Colleagues:

[With apologies for any cross postings.]

Now we are entering the winter season (in the Northern Hemisphere), I  wanted to remind you of the Snowtweets project that we have developed  to enable users of Twitter to “tweet” snow depth from a known  location. Snowtweets is all about encouraging specialists and non- specialists to make simple measurements of snow depth that can we can pick up from Twitter for our own data base and pass them through to a
visualization package called Snowbird (Adobe Air application available  from our web site). Snowbird posts the snow depth on a representation  of the globe (e.g. Blue Marble).

We are seeking to use this information to help with our remote sensing  and model estimates (and to provide a modicum of a public service).

To participate, you will need to have a Twitter account (free) and  start tweeting. To see the data you can download and fire up the  Snowbird application. All you need to know about how to do it, and how  to get Snowbird, can be found on our website:

http://snowcore.uwaterloo.ca/snowbird

Please feel free to join in and “tweet”. Our goal is to reach out to long-term participants (universities, schools, research centres,
community/professional groups) who have an interest in contributing  for professional/academic/educational reasons. The emphasis is on ease  of use (Twitter can be accessed through the web including via mobile  data devices) to get more people involved.

Happy Tweeting!

Richard
—————————————————–
Dr. Richard Kelly
Associate Professor
President, Eastern Snow Conference
Department of Geography & Environmental Management
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1
Vox. (+1) 519-888-4567 etxn: 35451

email: rejkelly@uwaterloo.ca
web: www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/u/rejkelly