Classroom Blogging

My students loved using the blog for their write-ups of the Natural History of Alaska (BIO 104) field trips this summer. They were given a few guidelines then left to be creative in how they interpreted those guidelines. The guidelines were: date, time, weather, location, list of species identified & a short narrative. Only one of my four students (very small class) was local & two were from other continents. They ended up writing, as much for the folks back home, as for the class. It allowed them to share their explorations with the world & their friends as well as post pictures of the places and themselves in the places. It surpassed my expectations as a learning tool! Thanks for showing me this avenue & 'making' me use it in the class. When I have time I will summarize their lists into a single list for each location. My plan is to keep the blog, maybe add some of my own observations & use it for other classes. It may not be the best tool, but it will be a start at a comprehensive document of species for PWS. We took a 3 hour trip twice a week near town, with one all day trip to Columbia Glacier and an overnight to McCarthy.

Clicking on the title should take you to the classroom blog.

Summer Travel or how I spent my summer vacation!

Vacation? What vacation? Mine was a working vacation crammed into the middle of 2 intense 6 week lab science classes. That being said it was awesome.

My prius & I drove from Valdez to Tacoma where I put all my worldly belongings on a uhaul. The car was put on a trailer & towed behind the uhaul. The trip down was fast, but great. My little car got 50+ mph even on the roughest parts of the road. I saw lots of wildlife. My original intent was to fly & drive a uhaul back. That plan chanced when the friend who was to help had a massive heart attach & cardiac arrest 3 days before I was to leave. All her keys were lost by the EMTs, but her life was saved. She was still in a coma when I left. Having no Credit card (by choice) I was unable to rent a car, so I drove. Planning to camp on the way down, chanced to sleeping in my car after I saw 3 brown bears near where I planned to stop in the middle of nowhere. Being small means I can sleep in my car! As it was comfy, easy to set up & cost nothing, I did this all the way down. I love to drive long distances, see all the plants & animals, the different geology of each area. The Alaska highway is a great place for all that. Very meditative. I've become quite good at taking pics from a moving car or pulling over suddenly onto the side of the road. Scientists are trained to be observant & I am very good at observing nature! Best of all it had very few people. I'm not really a people person, or at best like my people in small numbers.

Once I got to Tacoma, I camped in a state campground in Gig Harbor, near where my storage unit was. I had planned on doing a lot of sorting in the week I'd be there, but driving took half that time & I spent most of the rest of the time visiting my friend. Another friend came up from Oregon to help me drive back up. That trip was much longer & took waaaaaaaaay more fuel, but we had a great time. I am grateful for the extra person to help drive & keep me company. My friend & I go back 20 years and haven't been able to spend much time together for several years, so that was really great! I went back to teaching two days after we got back and just finished last week.

I now have all my stuff (and then some) & its like Christmas. I've been sorting as I've had time & am planning a BIG garage sale later this month. You are all invited! A great excuse to come to Valdez, eh?

I've been out on PWS twice since returning & am always just totally awed by the majesty & beauty of it all. I'm finally getting my fishing license tomorrow & planning to get my own salmon here real quick.

Summer is slow & wet this year in Valdez, but the berries are starting to come on: salmon berries, blueberries (high & bog), crow berries, cloud berries, nagoonberries, currants & more. Oh YUM. The bears have been very bad in Valdez this year. They've relocated a couple browns & have had to put several black bears down as people aren't using proper precautions and they are coming into town. I put a bear bell on my dog when I go for a walk & if he becomes uncomfortable we turn around. I'd like my encounters with bears to be from a distance.

I'd love to hear how others spent the summer!

Using Course Materials

I'm been applying some of the techniques we learned in my classes that started last week and to make me work more effectively. When I did my first week on BB, I forgot to copy the format so had to recreate it this week. Now I've made copies of it for each week, all I have to do is fill it in each week. This will save me a lot of time & will improve consistency for my students. I tend to work in an ad lib style which is great when I have to punt, and I know students appreciate consistency so having a consistent format should be helpful to them.

Google reader allows me to skim the news stories from all the sources I was using, something I was doing rather erratically before. So I'm using less time & energy and getting more out of it. I have given my students the link to the ones I want to share with them.

My natural history class is using the blog I set up for them. They were very enthusiastic about it, but need to pay more attention to how they are to use it. It's a learning experience. It can be found here, if anyone wants to look at it.

http://naturalhistoryofpws-ak.blogspot.com/

In my 'spare time' I've been exploring Second Life as a possible source for my students. I am amazed at what has been created. I've mostly gone to educational sites at this point and haven't interacted with anyone. I tend to be shy around strangers. Some lands have very good content. If anyone joins, I am Jaece Zapatero. I can see it as being a good place to have virtual "f2f" conversations with people I know.

I had a great trip down from Fairbanks, found lots more cool rocks, some fossils and some blooming wildflowers. I was relieved when I got home to see that Valdez was finally turning green and that most of the snow was gone.

I leave on Thursday to get my stuff out of storage and drive it back up here. The friend (ex) who was going to help me had a cardiac arrest last monday night. I am grateful she is recovering but it is hard to be so far away. It will be good to see her when I get there. I'm doing what I do well: punting so I can accomplish my goal. We have been planning this for over a year, and I am now back to square one.

Instructional Designer Sharing

This was great! We all know there are so many different ways of learning, you all provided a variety of useful tools and why you like them! It was great to see the variety of ways that all of you keep current in your fields and manage your time. I saw somethings that look like they will be helpful for me and ways to find other information that will help me work more effectively.

I really like the idea of using the Science Friday Island in Second life as an assignment. However, I can't find a schedule of topics anywhere on their page, Talk of the nation's page or NPR's page. I would want to send them when there would be a topic pertinent to the specific class. I sent an email & will post if I get a response.

Time management is a huge issue in teaching lab classes at the community college level. All my classes are lab classes. I teach 3 classes. Each class I teach is 3 hours of lecture & 3 hours of lab a week. Which means I basically prep two different classes for each subject. I create most of my own labs, sometimes they are based on labs others have done but often I can't find anything that meets learning outcomes I have. Then I have to obtain the material, set it up, conduct the lab and clean it up. I asked for, and received, student teaching assistants but being freshman or sophomore students they sometimes require almost more supervision than the help they provide. Kinda like getting your kids to do something they don't want to do! All of this can take 10-20 hours per week, for 3 hours of lab, which counts for 1 hour of 'teaching time'. Much more work than for 1 hour of lecture time. The inequality of this is a post for another time. It just makes time management all that more important.

Effective learning activities?

I use the same lab for several different courses with slightly different twists to it. It has always been highly effective. Its a lab where students mimic the spread of HIV by indiscriminately sharing 'body fluids' with others of the same and different genders. One unidentified tube has a substance that will react to a testing reagent. As they share fluids with each other this substances spreads across the student population. We then try to trace it back to the original source. It is always fun and successful in teaching the concepts of epidemiology and a lead in for discussions about HIV, and safe sex. It also gets the point across that a virus, like HIV, can spread extremely fast & easily in relatively closed populations. The smaller the population of the class, the faster and more completely it spreads.

A poorly effectively activity I used was to demonstrate the process of gel electrophoresis as a way of understanding one way that molecular information can be obtained. There was no by-in to this and it wasn't meaningful. I tossed the demonstration then had them do the process themselves as part of a lab that also allowed them to isolate their own DNA from their saliva.

Class homepage

I will be using Blackboard for my class homepage.
Click here to access Blackboard

Pro's and Con's of public Assessment in Natural History

I have been playing with the idea of having my natural history students blog their field notes. Although all students will be at the same sites, each student will be bringing their personal knowledge into play and each will experience it differently. As I write the list below, I can see that it will be an awesome tool for learning & assessment.

• Cons of public assessment
• Fear of making a fool of one's self
• Risk of being shut down or rejected
• Using other's blogs as way of comparing oneself to others negatively
  
• Difference between public vs private identity
  
• Pros of public assessment
• Teaching is an awesome way of learning
• Ability to communicate knowledge (to peers)
• Feedback is essential
• Awareness that it is OK if you don't know everything
• "Thats a really great question for a grad student to undertake"
• Encourages creativity
• Using other's blogs as a way of looking at the same experience differently
• Teacher proofs evaluation!
• Could use clickers or other ways that allow evaluate/give feed back to each other
• Could build in collaboration
• Public feedback can increase confidence
  

Enduring question

Enduring understanding: We are more than the sum of our parts. How does your brain work.

Enduring question: Give an example that demonstrates emergent properties of a complex system, such as the brain.

Carol says: If the answer is "it depends", its a good enduring question

Reflection on Case Study#1

Wow, quite an ambitious undertaking. I like the "lets try it & see where it goes" attitude. I've done plenty of that! I like that she didn't put her agenda onto what they wrote and allowed them to receive guidance from others. Her goals fit well with preparing students to be successful after school by involving them in this activity.

I've thought about doing this with one of my classes but know nothing about using wikipedia. It sounds and bit overwhelming. I did a bit on looking around wikipedia and found the process daunting. Maybe I'll try it on blackboards wiki first.

I do have to admit that I've used Wikipedia as a "quick & dirty" first resource then searching from there.

Asperagus, peaches and grapes....oh my!

One thing I'm getting from being in Fairbanks this week is the ability to go to a large grocery store and purchase real fruits & vegetables. It's very exciting. At this point, Valdez has one small grocery store. The town joke is that we get the produce that won't sell in Anchorage. Moving here from the PNW where fresh organic fruit & vegetables can be bought at farmers markets...I refused to buy fresh produce for the first 6 months I was here. It is all old & it costs a fortune. Finally, I relented but the choices are so few, the prices remain exorbitant and the quality is poor.

So here, I will happily munch on fresh produce for the entire week. Yum!