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!

Firefox add ons

Being visually oriented, I really like the color tabs!

I'm using ScribeFire to write this and will having to use it more with other pages to see if I will find it worthwhile. I see that it opens across all tabs that I have open which is kind of cool...cuz I often have 15 or 20 tabs open at once! On the otherhand, if I close it on a single page...such as my webmail...it closes it everywhere, but the content is still there when I reopen it.

I can see that the tray scientific calculator will also be invaluable as I hate the MS calculator & often need to check a calculation while I'm online.

Finally, I'm going to try out stumble upon but am not sure I really have the time to look through random sites.
I still have to explore Zotero,

Chris's Big Picture

• Most intriguing
• Brain changes (physiological or anatomical) as we connect. The biologist in me wants to see a functional MRI that shows where & what is happening!
  
• Emergence of participatory culture
• New multi-culturalism
  
• Most irritating
• The pace was a big irritating but I was able to keep up, take notes & follow what Chris was saying so it must not have been too fast.
  
• Headscratcher
• Amount of information in world is staggering.