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.
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.
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:
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
Want to spice up your online profile? There are some fun games for creating science covers and a genius baby with your own pictures. It would be fun to do a science student of the month cover for my distance learning classes too. I think I will spice up my online profile to begin with.
One strategey that has worked for me with video classes is to start with an opener. This can be a riddle, an optical illusion, a cartoon, or interesting anomaly. This is also a good way to set the stage or connect with background knowledge and experiences. Here are some ideas to share. Please add to the list!
Start with a video clip. The clip should relate to the day’s objective or the ongoing process of building science process skills. I also like to show clips of famous scientist. Teacher’s Domain has fantastic resources for lesson intros and content. Brain Pop has some great free clips and a reasonable subscription rate. Of course You Tube has a cornucopia of resource if you can find them quickly (or have access)
Interesting fact or a Why Question How Stuff Works is are other great source to start with. You could also challenge kids to judge the credibility of web page claims and teach them how to critically choose sources. The tree octopus is a fun one to start with.
Telling Stories. Relate the day’s objective to a funny or interesting story, myth or anecdote
Symbols, Metaphors and Analogies. Gather an assortment of objects or pictures that are good analogies for your current objectives. Challenge the students to explain why this is a good analogy and why its a poor analogy.
Metaphors and Analogies.
Cartoons. What’s the punch line? Why is this funny? How does this relate to our lesson
Writing prompts. Ask the students to write about your opener. What would you like to know? This topic reminds me of? It’s interesting because….? You can also use writing prompts or graphic organizers to help think about your opener.
Riddles and puzzlers and optical illusions- You can find these by searching in google. Here’s and example of a site I use. Here is an example of optical illusions that some students have put together. Another good site is pzzls.
I was lucky enough to attend the Basic Art Institute funded by the Alaska Arts Education Consortium. Two weeks of music, drama, visual and cultural arts in Juneau at the University of Alaska Southeast Campus. What a treat. So many folks might ask, “how is art related to teaching science?” Well, check out another great project in Alaska, Project Articulate to help answer this question. Forget the grade level descriptions. You can see how the Observe, Question and Write lesson helps students learn science process skills such as inference and prediction. Alaska Landscapes with Georgia O”Keefe is a great scaffold for discussion of ecosystems and biomes. There are many kits that compliment science well and can be “beefed” up for high school students, check out the diatoms lesson. Of course my favorite is the Andrew Goldsworthy kit. A perfect compliment to any beach or environmental outing. Here is a picture and poem of our master piece on the Auke Bay beach.
Beach Art
Balance in nature
Day and night, male and female
Perfect harmony
I had the privilege of visiting the Alaska Sea Life center this summer. They have an amazing tide pool where you can touch sea anemone and sea urchins. I could stay there all day. For those who can’t visit in person they produce fantastic virtual field trips. Check them out on the web.
