Crowdmap is a new easy-to-access instance of the Ushahidi intelligent mapping software. It resides “in the cloud”: there is no software to install. Above is a screencast from an ambitious Spanish teacher in the Saint Louis area, sketching how the tool functions and how he might use it in the classroom–or rather how he expects his students to take the lead in finding applications for this tool. If you want a glimpse into the future of education, watch.
Aug 17
Droid Cam Moon
Droid Cam Moon, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.
I captured this image with the camera on my Droid phone (with the help of an 8″ dobsonian telescope.) I share it in the blog mostly to restore my shattered confidence after a recent accidental post from the same phone. Technology really is wonderful. It just requires a bit more care than I’m often inclined to invest.
The number of options on the Droid’s camera is daunting. One of these days I’ll try them all out. I must admit that I miss the simplicity of the camera on my LG Dare, but only until I find out the advantages of the Droid’s whistles and bells.
My nephew Henry found the moon in my telescope in preparation for this image…way to go, Henry!
Jul 13
Sensing our World as global citizens
Embedded here are nearly 200 images taken by 41 middle school students during a four hour water source mapping project at the University of Notre Dame. A module in NISMEC’s Sensing Our World experience, the activity pre-figured the wellhead protection project spearheaded by NDeRC Fellow Carrie Rodak and high school teachers John Gensic of New Prairie and Mike Walsh of Saint Joseph’s. BOSCO-Uganda’s Classroom-to-classroom project was the inspiration for this activity. The students here in the US did what Northern Ugandan students are doing with their own water sources. Having learned to interact with one another in a wiki over their own maps they engaged Ugandan students in the same way.
Linked here are maps that middle school students generated at ND and in Uganda. If you follow the links to the wiki pages the students (and teachers) are creating, you see a great deal of similarity. I’m hoping that the students see this, too.
Jul 12
Fermilab
A trip to Fermilab is always a treat. The occasion last Friday was a small working group seeking to establish some inter-rater reliability for assessing student posters using a common rubric. This was an I2U2 exercise: Interactions in Understanding the Universe (IiUU: 2 “i”s, 2 “U”s–I2U2.) I spend some time on this acronym since I2U2 pays most of my salary: I’m the Education Program Leader for the I2U2 effort to build online research environments for high school students.
There’s a lot to say about Fermilab. I recommend letting the slides do the talking. Most of the images collected in this Flickr slideshow were taken from the 15th floor of Wilson Hall. (In a couple of cases you’ll have to turn your monitor around to read them…I’ll fix those in flickr when I get a chance.)
Jul 01
Cloning a Fluorescent Gene
Geno.typ.es (formerly Peyer Labs) brought its Cloning a Fluorescent Gene laboratory activity to campus last week. They presented the activity in two venues: the NDeRC BioEYES seminar, and a two-afternoon seminar for BioEYES high school teachers from previous cohorts (and a few others.) Above are images drawn in petri dishes with bacteria transformed with a fluorescent gene. Fun stuff.
Jun 21
A little web 2.0 training
More than two dozen K-12 teachers went through an introduction to Wikispaces at Notre Dame’s Jordan Hall of Science today. The introduction was provided by NDeRC Coordinator and high energy physicist Patrick Mooney. The Bioeyes.michianastem.org wiki is meant to support collaboration among members of the third cohort of BioEYES teachers.
BioEYES is a program where students breed and observe the development of zebrafish in a week-long guided classroom experience. This cohort brings to 75 the number of K-12 teachers in Michiana who have completed the week-long professional development program introducing teachers to the week-long classroom activity, as well as to modern biology techniques. That portion is being conducted this year in collaboration with Otyp; about whom see my recent blog on “as if computational biology were a really big deal“.)
This is an exciting combination, and we’re looking forward to the good directions these cohort III BioEYES teachers will take once equipped with these resources.
Jun 18
Calibrating students
Yesterday I had the good fortune of watching a student’s face light up on the occasion of (what seemed to be) his first encounter with the idea of calibration. We were imaging some microstructure using AMF. (See the image above: the view on the right is top-down, and on the left, as if looking flat across the surface at the location of the arrow, situated at the very bottom right of the top-down view.) I really didn’t know much about the surface I was imaging; I had grabbed a pre-fabricated sample just to introduce the AFM. But I guessed aloud that this piece might be manufactured for calibration of scanning probe microscopes like the AFM we were using, for I had seen other such devices sold for that purpose.
I explained that someone could manufacture a device like this within certain tolerances–plus or minus just so much distance–that could be verified by the best instruments we have. That confidence in measurement could be exported to other instruments by aligning them–calibrating them–so that the measurements they report conform to what we know about this standard sample with known distances and tolerances.
That was a way cool idea to this student. He was himself being calibrated, in a way, by the communication of an idea. He’s in a better position to understand instrumentation, now. So, it seems, am I.
Jun 15
A dozen years of professional development?
Every year for this now the 12th year, high school physics teachers have worked together in particle physics research at the University of Notre Dame. Eight weeks each summer of full time research, followed by weekly meetings throughout the academic year. Of course there are teachers who have come and gone, some after a number of years, but there are seven teachers at least who have been involved since the first invitation.
You could look at this as (40 hrs/week x 8 weeks/year x 12 years = 3840 summertime hours, plus 1.5 hrs/week x ~30 weeks/yr x 12 years= 540 academic year hours, for a total of) somewhere near to 4400 hours of professional development. Or you could look at it as professional transformation. From either perspective, this is a different way of being a teacher. It’s a different way of being in the particle physics community.
These teachers are gathered to prepare the way for their summer research and for the research activities of their high school student colleagues who will join them in two days. They’ll work side by side in research collaborations for six or seven weeks this summer.
You could look at this as a particle physics course for high school students. Or you could look at it as having nothing much to do with school. Either way, this is a different way of being a student. It’s also a different way of being in the particle physics community.
When these teachers invited those students to join the particle physics community, there was something going on that doesn’t typically happen in schools. Issuing effective invitations into a community to which they themselves belong seems more like recruitment, more like coaching, more like collaborating than what teachers typically do in classrooms.
Why should this be so?