I'm a teacher working with at-risk students in an alternative secondary school in White Rock, BC.
I live on 5 acres close to Vancouver, Canada, on B.C.'s south coast in the Pacific Northwest. My computer faces a huge picture window that looks out across the rest of Surrey and the Fraser River valley all the way to the Coast Mountains on the North Shore of Burrard Inlet.
I leave in a little over 24 hours for NECC in Washington, DC. I hope if you’re coming that you’ll stop and see my poster session on Tuesday from 10-12. I’m hoping people will come to explore ways to integrate these new tools into their work. Here’s the link to my presentation wiki -->http://small-changes-big-returns.wikispaces.com/
Tomorrow I’m giving a presentation in the morning and have an interview for a new position in the afternoon. Then it’s home to pack and snooze before heading to the airport in Bellingham.
I just finished a huge project for my Assessment course at Wilkes and the Web2.0 course has already begun.
I have to make a short video presentation for an application to go to Google Academy in August. I have a theme and will work on the way out on the plane!!!
My husband is going to meet me in Nova Scotia and we’re touring Canada on our way home together. We haven’t had a vacation in years so I’m looking forward to spending extended time with my man. The fly in the ointment will be my Wilkes homework! We’re going to have to find all the wifi hotspots so I can keep the course work up to date.
So for the next few weeks, please check out my blog entries on the Wilkes Instructional Media website. I’m the online grad assistant for the Master’s program there and maintain the blog.
See you at NECC. If you’re coming, please find me or leave me a message on the Wilkes blog and I’ll find you!!!
On the other, I wish we had an extra week or two extra because I'm often running behind and have to pack 3 weeks' worth of instruction and review into two.
The kids are becoming raggedy and difficult to manage. The pressure is on in every class and they feel it. We teachers are cranky and quick to react. I secretly pray for a rainy June to help keep my classroom cool and make it easier for the students to stay on task. When the sun shines, they spend too long at the beach and come in the next day with sunburn and sunstroke. I keep the lights off and dole out wet, cool paper towels for the back of their necks and other sunburned bodied parts. The long hours of daylight can lead to drinking and driving or taking a lift home from a party in the car of an inexperienced driver. I worry about who might not make it home safely.
I thought I'd dedicate my next few blog entries to interactive educational games that can make review more engaging for students. My first pick is Russel Tarr's wonderful collection of Classtools. I have been looking for ways to create quick review activities for the new Science 10 program here in BC. There are several geography samples on the website that have sparked some creative ideas for me. "Classtools.net allows you to create free educational games, activities and diagrams in a Flash! Host them on your own blog, website or intranet! No sign up, no passwords, no charge!" Russel Tarr has created dozens of interactive activities that I think kids will find very cool. Each template can be saved as a stand alone HTML file or you can use the embed code to post games you've created on a class website, blog or wiki. Russel will store your files on his server indefinitely. Only those not used for a year are cleared out periodically.
To access a game template click on a link in the list on the right side of his home page. The question mark button (bottom right) will take you to a help page where you'll find an overview of the activity, lesson plan suggestions, and samples if any have been posted. I think my favourites are: the Virtual Book,
the Fishbone (I've linked the diagram to a how-to video for you),
and Arcade Game Generator. When students open one of these, they can choose any of the 5 game formats.
I have provided screen captures for all except the Flashcards. If you look at my next post in a couple of days, I'll be writing about a different website my students are using to build their comprehensive sets of flash cards for learning and reviewing terms and key ideas.
Information about this celestial event comes to my in-box every year about this time, so I'm going to use it as a take off point for a piece about internet misinformation. [Let me set the record straight. There's no need to plan your Mars viewing party for August 27th because that great event occurred back in 2003. For a complete commentary, you can take a look at this page in Hoax-Slayer.]
The more we move from print to online sources, the more we will need to teach our students to be skeptical about what they're reading. Textbooks are authoritative but can become quickly outdated; the internet is current but so often the information students find is just plain wrong. When reading and researching, students need to first question the authenticity of their sources. They must develop the habit of evaluating and cross-checking all their sources.
and, just plain old mistakes (the category to which I think the Mars misinformation belongs)
Once misinformation makes its way into the worldwide web it makes it's own place there in the same way that accurate information does. In our bodies, once a nerve impulse gathers enough strength to fire, it cannot be stopped. Misinformation -- if it's engaging enough or made to look authoritative or repeated enough --can take on a life of its own.
If it's out there, chances are my students will find it and want to use it. Being diligent is a lot more time consuming for everyone. Students have to look past the first few sources they find and teachers must take the time to check out all the references they chose to assess them for reliability. Seeing should not be believing.
These links will take you to sources you can draw from to create lessons to teach students to critically evaluate their sources.
Kath Schrock: "With the advent of the World Wide Web and the huge amount of information that is contained there, students need to be able to critically evaluate a Web page for authenticity, applicability, authorship, bias, and usability. " She provides surveys that can be applied to assess websites, how to's, and a list of sites you can use to demonstrate the importance of critical evaluation.
Keith McPherson (article): "Critically literate internet surfers have developed thinking skills that prevent them from being duped by online information and experiences."
The videos are now working!! It may take me a while, but I get there eventually. Yeah hooray!!
Image source: bruce7: Cartoon Speed Camera in iStockphoto (20 January 2006)
Spring only lasts about 2 weeks in the Lower Mainland of BC. Almost overnight the tallsilver maples that shade my yard in the summer come into leaf. The cherry, apple, and plum trees bloom. The little birds chase away the crows, and adult ducks stand guard near nests in the ditches that run alongside our road.
On Saturday there were eagles soaring on the thermals over my back field, so I decided to take a peek at the Eaglecam on Hornby Island.
When I tuned in towards the end of the day the 2 downy grey lumps were awake and cuddling up to the parent. In the first clip ('screencaptured' by me) you'll see them sleeping but they do move a bit when the parent moves. In the second clip (from the website; posted in April), there are 2 parents feeding the young. This footage came from the Hancock Wildlife Foundation.
These are wonderful examples of using technology to observe natural phenomena that inspire a sense of wonder. What a great starting place for a project! What is the place of the eagles in the food chain? What are the greatest threats to these magnificent birds in our area: loss of habitat? pesticide sprays? threats to their food source? What signs of stress are being seen in the population? How would the food chain be affected if they disappeared? (Here's a link to a collection of eagle resources for educators.)
What follows is a list of live nature webcams you can share with your students:
A different kind of 'wildlife' is pictured above. If you have a favourite webcam site (polar bears?) please share it in a comment and include the link.
My next
course at Wilkes – Assessment – is about to begin, and I have to admit that I’ve been sneaking a peak at the course moodle. The first glance convinced me that I’ll have to better plant my weeks in order to keep all the responsibilities I’m juggling up in the air.
Interestingly,
Angela Maiers’ session
in Classroom 2.0 Live on Saturday was about how we can better manage our time when it comes to keeping up with reading and social networking. Ironically, I tuned into the session about half way through. After 2 weeks with several sleepless nights preparing for 3
presentations, struggling with how to make a project rubric in the last course, and trying to get back into giving my own school projects more time, I had decided to give myself permission to step away from the computer for a while and overslept the start time.
Somehow I don’t think Angela would ever have let that happen (sigh). She has a plan for just about everything: for her days, for her blog, for her Twittering, for her company ... and she approaches each of these with the goal of not only getting through all the networking tasks but with the deliberate intention of becoming even more connected.
I’m going to listen to the full archive of Angela’s session again and work on clarifying my own goals for the next months. I’ve reached a ‘hub moment’ in my life when some important decisions have to be made. Will I go back to my desk in the fall or will I retire? If I do retire, with breast cancer in my past, can I take the long view? How can I not? What do I really want to be doing this time next year? How can I best make that happen?
(clicking this picture will to open the
Elluminate archive)
One of the first Discussions in the Assessment course asks us to write about our expectations. I’m not really sure I have any – hopes perhaps, but not expectations. My quick preview revealed that much of the focus will be about the testing requirements US schools now live under. This is going to touch deep nerves in many of my co-students whose schools are being transformed into test prep machines in an endeavour to get their reading and math scores up and whose colleagues are being laid off in huge numbers as a result of the difficult economic time in their states. The week 3 assignment asks us to review a journal or newspaper article about NCLB and comment on how it touches our own lives. This one by Jordan Sonnonblick in the School Library Journal (5/1/2008) I think will strike a deep chord with many of them: Killing Me Softly: No Child Left Behind.
What I’ll be looking for personally is whether this course will model a richer approach
to assessment. My e-teaching colleagues are struggling with how to ‘see’ multidimensional growth in their online students. They want their assessments to take into account more than content acquisition, skills development, and intellectual capability. They want ways to assess deeper learning and affect, but have few models for this.
During the last course -- ‘Project-Based Learning’ – many of the students experienced some trepidation about doing the group project. When it became apparent that we could not choose our own partners, many fears and frustrations associated with past group projects bubbled to the surface: how were the partners going to be chosen? how would we ever find a time when we could all meet? what if one person in the group didn’t finish his/her part of the project? what if we couldn’t agree on what to do? what if I did all the work and everyone got a good mark because of it?
I was able to make a personal peace with all of this by finally learning how to work toplease myself. If others benefit from my work, that in no way hurts me. If we can so easily accept the idea of ‘collateral damage’ (other people being
unintentionally hurt by our actions or decisions) why is the opposite so hard to swallow (others unintentionally benefiting)? I was fortunate because my 2 partners were equally involved in the group project, but if they had not been, I’d have still done the work because I’m taking this program to force myself to learn new skills and approaches by doing. That’s what is making me happy right now.
That being said, what monsters seem to be lurking in the closet of this new course? First there are a lot of tests!! Well – they’re called ‘quizzes’, but if it looks like a test and is marked like a test – in my life that makes it a test. I’m wondering if we’ll be left all alone trying to figure out the answers or if there will be some direct instruction to complement the readings and make the main points clear.
Finally, I’m going to have to really reach to make the deliberate concentration on ‘issues American’ meaningful in my little Canadian corner of the universe. When chatting with my US counterparts on ‘Wilkes Tuesdays’ I always feel a deep sense of relief that my work is not encumbered by provincial accountability measures, high stakes standardised testing, and branding of educational initiatives. It spurs me to work even harder to ensure that the parents of my students are not given reason to turn to shallow, and ill-planned initiatives like NCLB because don’t trust the quality of my teaching.
The good news is that although I didn’t think I had anything to learn from the constructivist
approach when I started my PBL course, it’s actually had a profound effect on my approach to course planning. I’m optimistic that the same thing will have happened by the time I reach the end of Assessment.
I have just finished my first Wilkes course. It was about project-based learning
and the Playing for Change people have created one of the most interesting collaborative projects I’ve come across. It’s also a great way to celebrate the end of a hefty learning experience. Please go to their website and either buy the CD or make a donation. One course down; ??!!@#?? to go. I’m onto Assessment next, have taken a peek at the Moodle, and it looks like a real bear.
Fab Find for the week: I was presenting at the VSS – Learning: Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere spring conference and came across these people among the displays. This looks so cool!
“The Virtual Museum of Canada celebrates the stories and treasures that have come to define Canada over the centuries. Here you will find innovative multimedia content that educates, inspires and fascinates! The VMC harnesses the power of the Internet to bring Canada's rich and diverse heritage into our homes, schools and places of work. This revolutionary medium allows for perspectives and interpretations that are both original and revealing.”
They have linked museums (historical and scientific) all over the country and made it possible to create and share lessons with archived material right on their site. You can also start a blog or a wiki. You enter through one of the 7 portals.
(clickpic for ‘Fun & Games’)
Let’s try the teachers’ workroom. It’s probably the least interesting looking place in the museum, but it offers some really neat capabilities. Remember when you used to create a lesson out of your own questions and bits from the
newspaper or photocopied from other sources. You’d write a bit and then tape or glue stick a bit and write some more and then tape some more. When I was in a hurry, I’d use paperclips to hold the articles in place and whip the page over onto the photocopier and hope everything still lined up.
(clicpic)
Well now you can do that all online with archived material from any museum in Canada. You can type in an introduction and embed an object (text, flash, whatever is available in the archives) and then type a question and embed another object and so forth until you have the entire lesson constructed and stored on their server. You can even add the specific objectives met at the bottom. The help desk is even open evenings, weekends and holidays!
Then I got to wondering if there were other great resources like this anywhere else and came across the Virtual Library Museum Pages with links to museums all over the world.
(clicpic)
Finally I discovered this link is from a wiki for a course on using museum resources in teaching. If you click on the individual students, you can see their sample lessons, projects, and some of the ways they used Web 2.0 tools.
"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the young mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards."
I am now officially
a student in the online Wilkes Instructional Media Graduate Program nearing the
end of my first course. Called Project-Based
Learning, it was about how to change up your delivery model to engage
student more in active learning. Under this model, students work in
groups to unravel answers to ‘driving’ or ‘enduring’
inquiry questions that are intended to give more relevance to their studies and
help them to learn to apply skills in new situations by simulating real life
roles in the classroom. Projects have to be highly planned with underlying
structures that ensure students gain both skills and content and also higher
order skills.
We in BC have yet
to see as much of this as has swept through the US, although our new math
program (it gets a complete overhaul about every 7-10 years) has been
redesigned on the American model and makes projects the vehicle through which
math skills and concepts are to be explored, learned, practiced, and applied.
I always find it
interesting that we follow the US in content and teaching models in Math even when
they are clearly struggling with the fact that their own students are not
excelling in that subject. Where will adapting this model put our students in
10 years? I’m curious to take a look at the new texts and wonder if there
might be some workshopping potential there now that I’m a PBL insider. I’m
also working on a rewrite of Earth Science 11 along a more project-based model,
but group work is essential to this approach and I work in an individualized
program. Without the interchange between group members to foster collaboration
and dialogue, I’m not sure how it will work.
Taking a course
online is an interesting experience. Assignments consist of participating in threaded
discussions, writing blogs and papers and even doing a group project -- which I
managed with partners living 2 provinces and 2 time zones east of me in
Saskatchewan. For someone who has a lot to say, this means there’s a lot
of typing to do. I really wish I’d taken that in high school (way back before
it ever became keyboarding). I make a lot of typos that slow me down, and my
proofreading skills are not always the best especially when I’m writing close
to the deadline. I’ve learned to turn off the autocorrect which often
guesses wrong, and to pay very close attention to the little red line beneath
misspelled words. It’s kind of like learning to listen to the bells and
dingers in cars without electronic locks. If you ignore them, you can find
yourself locked out of your car with the keys still in the ignition and the
lights on as I did way back in 97 the day I drove home my first new Rav4.
(click)
Vince Hill, the
principal of Credenda (a virtual school that offers secondary and some college
programs) and fellow Wilkes IM student has started a Wilkes support group that
meets online in an Elluminate room on Tuesday nights! These gatherings take the
place of meeting up with fellow students in a pub or coffee shop after a regular
class on campus and give us to compare experiences and ask each other for help.
They’re an absolute lifeline for me. I know I’d feel very isolated in
my little Canadian corner without them. A few of us try to take the same
courses so we’re really getting to know each other. Sometimes the instructors
drop by as well so we can ‘meet them’ and they can field questions.
Vince is an
interesting fellow. Several of his staff decided to take this program, and he decided
to do it with them so he’d be able to better understand their work. How
many principals have ever or would ever do that? Certainly none I’ve
worked for, and I’ve worked for some very good people over the years.
I grew up on radio. My dad was a radio broadcaster. When I lived in my tent by the beaver pond
in the Yukon, I kept a radio alive inside by hooking it up to an automobile battery. I
actually had two batteries and alternated them between tent and truck so there was always one
with enough juice to keep me happily listening to the CBC. Saturday Night Blues,
a pot of coffee warming on the wood cook stove, and the northern lights dancing
overhead –- it was a great way to live.
It’s not
surprising then that on Saturdays at 9:00 am Pacific time, I often listen
to Classroom 2.0 Live hosted by Peggy
George, Kim Caise, and Lorna Costantini. This week will be about:
(with Rushton Hurley –
click for his current project)
I ran into Ruston
at ILC 2008 in San Jose and have written about his current project, New Vista
for Learning, in an earlier blog. The Elluminate link to Saturday’s
session has been posted here for you:
I came across this
interesting tidbit this morning.
Ada
Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women
excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their
innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to
tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a
sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing
software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to
celebrate her achievements.”
Nearly 2000 people
–- mostly women – responded to this challenge. For a comprehensive
list of their blogposts, you can look at The Ada Lovelace Day Collection and to
see a few of the videos try this
link. The video I’ve selected for today speaks about a woman in
educational technology who is involved in Second Life, but it was also posted
by an interesting woman who calls herself KerryJ who is an Australian broadcaster
turned multimedia consultant who is now giving workshops on education.
(click)
Here is the link
to KerryJ’s blopost about the Jokadia Second
Live tour alluded to in the video below.
Now my project-bent
mind is seeing this as a possible starting place for a learning experience
about how women have contributed to technology. Who has been missed from this
list? Who would I have written about had I come across the pledge on time to
contribute? Do I have time for a Second Life when my first one is full to
overflowing? Is there a Wilkes IM elective on Virtual World Education? So many
questions . . . so little time.
I have Tom Jones’ voice in my head this morning. It’s the end of Spring Break and I have 90 minutes to go until the classroom 2.0 session on Podcasting. Don’t want to miss that one. The keyboard on my laptop is showing wear marks from so much typing since my desktop went wonky at the beginning of the month. It's been repaired and is apparently healthy now but I think 3 years worth of emails and bookmarks are gone. Woah,woah,woah . . .
I’m now officially back in school – yes I’m a student again at 57 taking the online Master’s in Instructional Media. My hope is to parlay this into some sort of work with student teachers at one of our local universities when I’m done. That’s pretty forward thinking for someone who’s just finished week 2, but that’s the long range plan. We’re deep into project-based learning and constructivism (there is no objective reality – only the meaning we attach to it). These courses zip by in 7 weeks so you just get a handle on one step and you have to leap to the next one without any time to breathe. Fortunately, I’ve connected with a collection of wonderful people who meet once a week in Elluminate to talk everything over.
The strength of the course is that it’s very practical – but in a way that’s also what makes it so tough. Sometimes the instructions for the assignments don’t provide sufficient clarity for me – but that could be because I’ve been away from all this for 20 years. Also the context is very clearly American – with meeting ‘the standards’ a constant concern and objective. Sometimes it’s hard for moi (Canadian) to fathom the pressures that the accountability initiatives have placed on colleagues in the US. Every time I talk with them, I’m more impressed by the system we have here in BC. I also thank those BC teachers who came before me for their foresight in fighting so strongly for professional autonomy. I am quickly gaining an appreciation for just how precious that is.
One of the women in the course is a teacher in California who has classes of 35. Others have 40. Pink slips have just gone out to 25,000 teachers there, and they’re worried that as many as 10 students more will be added to each class! My concerns seem so small by comparison. What will happen to that cohort of students if this lasts very long? Someone should be starting a longitudinal study on the effect of the added stress on the teachers still there trying to educate them. What will their health be like if the hard times last 5 years? 10? Where will the state turn for new teachers when this is all over? Who in their right mind would go into our profession there under these circumstances?
(click pic)
This may be a little disloyal –- using Posterous to tell you about a tool to use with Wordpress blogs -- for my courses I have to maintain a Wordpress Wilkes/Discovery blog. The available templates are so generically blah, and I’m going to be using the blog for a couple of years so I want it to say Pacific Northwest and breathe a little sea air into readers’ lives.
“Artisteer is the first and only Web design automation product that instantly creates fantastic looking, unique website templates and blog themes.” This is so cool. It lets you build a custom template for Wordpress blogs and websites without knowing anything about code. You can change the background and the header, and (within limits )the layout of the pages, font, colours and just about anything you can imagine to make a truly unique website. They also have loaded in lots of ideas and suggestions to help you get started. There is a free trial with the watermarks removed when you pay –- and yes, I did pay the $50 for the Home version. The business version is about $130.
Artisteer works from a menu that looks and feels like MSWord 2007.
Here’s what the default starter page looks like.
My personal template is beginning to take shape.
The background texture came from a website recommended by Technology Magazine where the texture photos are free for anyone to use, and the petroglyph lies in a secluded spot on a beach near where I live. My Wilkes blog will be called: No Looking Back referencing the Medusa myth. Anyone who turned back and looked at her would be turned into stone. (I’ve probably garbled it a little but it makes sense in my mind.)
I’m going to play with Artisteer a little more as the weeks go on, but there is one flaw for which Paul at the company has kindly sent me a fix and which I have posted below. In the default, the page scrolls beautifully over a still background; however, if you change the background from the default, it no longer remains fixed. The “Options . . .” pop-ups (where that magic function lies) are only available if you buy the expensive version. That means my lovely sea image scrolls away with the page and there is empty background beneath the page.
To fix this right now, you have to export the template and – take courage ! – change one word in the CSS code. Now it feels to me like I’ll have to export a few times to get the position of the titles and the tabs working the way I want them to anyway, and I haven’t tried that yet.
When I contacted the company, they said they would look into how to add this feature for home users which would make this pretty near a perfect piece of software for me! So thanks, Lance, Marc, Ellin and Paul for responding to my cries for help.
One last word – compress those background images before you use them or else they’ll download very slowly when you use your new template in your blog or website.
Now I’m off to learn how to podcast –- this week’s session in Classroom 2.0 Live. It’s 9:02!
Last week I attended the Saturday online session in Classroom 2.0 about Social Networking, Ning, and Classroom 2.0 given by Steve Hargadon. Here are the links to his blog and to his most recent Ning called The Future of Education. He used the session as an opportunity to let slip that he’s been hired by Elluminate to be the Social Learning Consultant for LearnCentral -- Ellluminate's new contribution to the ‘edu-connect-osphere’.
It’s a free service just for educators that will be in open beta in about 2 weeks. Steve is billing this as Facebook for educators. Once you complete your profile, they’ll be able to match you up with other LearnCentral members who have the same interests so they can share best practices, create groups, etc. The big thing is that Elluminate will be freely (no subscription/no cost) available for conversations between teachers or between classes. When you fill out a form to offer a web event, it will be posted to a central calendar. These will have to be public and recordable so an archive of events can be built.
To join the beta, you can either click the picture above and register at the bottom of the page or email Steve. LearnCentral's formal launch will be at NECC at the end of June -- so in plenty of time to practice over the summer and be ready for school in the fall. Assuming many districts don’t block LearnCentral as they have other social networking sites, this should give educators and classes a great way to connect, share, and collaborate.
If you think you might want to use Freepath or myFreepath some time in the future, now’s the time to sign up. They are coming out of beta very soon and are getting ready for the commercial release. I’m hoping they’ll consider educator pricing, but in the meantime they do have special offers for people who are already in the group of early users.
This is a great multimedia presentation program and a wonderful way to:
·package lecture/lesson/presentation material --> no desktops showing; drag &drop resources into place; just click your way through the frames
·help students collect research information quickly and easily, and later reorganize it by sliding the frames around
·help them create oral presentations individually or in groups, or
·build lessons that can be easily adapted to meet individual needs.
I’m a Freepath fan. Even if you’re not sure of what you’ll do with it now, downloading soon makes sense as you can get in on the beta discounts listed below if you decide to make more use of it later on. You can also join the ‘bigreturns’ group in myFreepath and download any of the playlists that might interest you or upload your own for the group to use.
Finally, this came from my Mum in Australia. When I’m done here, I’m going to check out my wax paper roll. That’s the one that always gives me the most trouble. I’d be interested in finding out the original source. If you come across it, please let me know and I’ll send her a thanks and attach a credit. She deserves it!!
Note: Mum writes that Aussie boxes are ‘tab-less’. To think that for 70 some years she didn’t know such a wonder existed and now every time she handles aluminum foil, she may experience a tiny pang of regret. I guess sometimes ignorance IS bliss!
For Elizabeth in Classroom 2.0 who asked if anyone had an idea for Pi Day:
Math students!
Lead the way towards reducing global warming!!!
Despite the pressures of having to get through the curriculum, I know we math teachers can dedicate one day to problem based learning. Using this National Geographic posted in Free Technology for Teachers as a take off point, I’ve come up with an idea that will challenge students to apply their skills -- math, communication, creative, innovative, strategic -- towards the solution of a real problem instead of just tearing their hair out over 'story' problems in the text. (Two trains 150 km apart are travelling towards each other on the same track . . . need I say more?) The prizes would all be pies: pizza for the winning group, apple for second, and tiny tarts or Eskimo Pies for everyone else? Perhaps math and science teachers could team up for a month starting on Pi Day (Mar. 14) and ending on Earth Day (April 22)?
Lesson Layout for the Students
Here’s your mission:People are very concerned about global warming, but they don’t know how to make changes in their own lives that will really make a difference to their carbon footprint. Your mission is to figure out a combination of 3 changes we can all make to begin the work of reversing the amount of carbon we are adding to the atmosphere. We’ve all contributed to increased carbon in the atmosphere, and we should all be making changes to undo the harm.
Here’s the real problem: to get people to really buy into your plan and make these changes, you have to make suggestions that people can easily incorporate into their lives. If you tell everyone to get out of their cars and onto bikes, how many will really take up the challenge even to save a polar bear? On the other hand, if you ask them to make small changes that will not inconvenience them too much, and them give them the statistics to illustrate how much of a difference this action will make if 10 or 1000 or 100 000 or more get involved, your plan could really make a difference!!
Here’s the challenge: You must find the optimal intersection between practicality and reduction of carbon footprint. Remember, many people really making small changes can have a huge impact. I want your plan to have that ‘viral’ appeal that will get people intrigued and involved.
Here’s where Pi comes in: Lay out your plan on a Venn diagram, design a circular logo to be made into a badge (circular of course!) people can post on MySpace, or Facebook, or a sticker for their car or front window --- etc.,ect., ect.
If anyone uses this, please share your ideas below or email me through my page in CEET . Look for my butterfly/hurricane in the logo in the list of new users on the login page. My group logo is the Blended Learning caudron. Let me know if you'd like to join.
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