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Think Before You Send

August 6, 2008 in Education, Technology | No comments

If you follow a lot of tech blogs, you’ll notice how a lot of writers talk about how they are frustrated with e-mail. You might wonder why they are so upset about something that has revolutionized how we communicate in the 21st century.

Clive Thompson from Wired Magazine blames the asymmetric nature of e-mail, in that it is “incredibly easy to send but often devilishly burdensome to receive.”

For example, in one minute I can send an email to a thousand coworkers asking them to review a document. Let’s say each recipient spends five seconds disgustedly discarding it. Boom: In just one minute, I’ve wasted 5,000 seconds — 1 hour, 23 minutes — of my organization’s time. Equally insidious is the growing plague of semi-meaningful emails — friend requests, one-word replies from your boss. Email apps weren’t designed to recognize such idiocies, which is why our inboxes become unruly messes, with important messages pushed offscreen and out of mind.

So as you are getting ready for the upcoming school year, make sure you use your e-mail account appropriately.  It’s so easy to send out a mass message to your school and district, but think aboutthe ramifications – will it be a semi-meaningful message, or will it waste others’ time?

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Education is not a Business

July 18, 2008 in Education | No comments

In the latest issue of Newsweek, Jonathan Alter discusses education reform in an article entitled “Obama’s No Brainer on Education.”

While making a few sound points (teachers should focus on student learning over job security, assessment can be effective and beneficial, etc), Alter suggests an oversimplified solution on how to fix education in the U.S. – education should be run like a business.  Furthermore, Alter suggests that Obama adopt this concept in his campaign.

Let’s not kid ourselves – education is not a business.  We cannot comfortably indoctrinate a business model onto our educational system if we believe that all children have a right to learn.  Period.

If we can suggest that education can be run like a business, then why stop there?  Why not run schools like we run the military?  Or like our health care system – oh wait, that’s a bad example.

While outcomes do matter in each scenario (schools, businesses, military, etc), the means in which they are achieved are vastly different.  In the real world, businesses fail and wars are lost.  The engine of competition that drives these entities is in opposition to the fundamental ideals upon which universal education is based.

I still believe that teaching is more than just a job.  It’s a calling.  It’s a belief that there is power in learning.  It’s a hope in our future.  In order to retain these sentiment in thousands of educators, we cannot simply treat a school as warehouse or office space.

When Obama revisits educational reform, it would help him to keep in mind the ideals of public education – and not those of the business world.  Education deserves to be evaluated and reformed in its own light.

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Creativity in Science

June 2, 2008 in Education, Science | 2 comments

Recently, our school was fortunate to have a visit from Billy Collins – former poet laureate of the U.S. He read a few entries from Poetry 180 – a collection of poems for each of the 180 days of the school year (geared at high school students). You can see all of the poems here.

Inspired by his visit, I asked my students to either select or write a poem about science – which they would post on our class discussion board. Not only did they really enjoy reading what others posted, a few did a fantastic job writing their own science poems:

We started a little competition you see
Between my bright lab partner and me
Well I made a fish that glows in the dark
So he made a cat that doesn’t meow but bark
To beat him made I a lobster with wings
So he made a crocodile that sings,
So well that I gave my dog a few extra legs
To run past his roosters laying eggs
Out of hand it then got with my alliperizebralion
Pronouncing his beast I ain’t even trying
And after I gave his firstborn the head of a moose
We both decided to call it a truce

There once was a chemist named Larry
Who wanted to be really hairy.
He brewed up a potion
That set into motion
Some hair-growing that was quite scary.

A naive young biologist, Shay,
Thought that rocks and stones had DNA.
With his rock-carving tools,
He looked like a fool,
And wasted there many a day.

As we were going over their submissions in class, one student questioned what poetry had to do with science. Of course, I took the bait and led the class into a discussion on the importance of creativity in science.

We discussed science in art, and art in science. We discussed science writing (like David Quammen and Lewis Thomas). We discussed wildlife photography, National Geographic’s CritterCam, and David Goodsell’s Molecular Art (see image right). And we also discussed one of the most important creative endeavors in science – experimental design.

Beyond the occasional creative assignment (Drawing Moles, Making Reaction Rate Videos, Einstein’s Facebook), I’ve never taught science using creativity as a common thread. And while this was readily apparent to me, I hadn’t realized how much my students had mentally segregated science from creativity.

So as I think about preparing for the next school year, I will be making sure that my students understand the influence of creative thought in science.

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Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

May 6, 2008 in Education, Technology | 3 comments

While listening to NPR the other day, my ears perked up to a story from On the Media called “The Pleasure Principle.” In it, Ethan Zuckerman (blogger and internet theorist) described a condition called homophily, and its potential danger while using the internet.

In short, homophily describes how we tend to flock together, seeking out ‘birds of a feather’. Perhaps Aaron Retica (NY Times) describes it best as “…our inexorable tendency to link up with one another in ways that confirm rather than test our core beliefs”.

Online, this tendency can be amplified. Ironically, with a wealth of diverse voices available to challenge our own ideas, we tend to use the internet to reinforce what we already believe – like an electronic pat on the back.

Thus, Zuckerman warns that homophily threatens to make us stupid. If we only seek out things with which we agree, then are we really using the internet as a tool to expand our own humanity?

This has obvious implications for anyone who has built up a social network like Twitter. I’ll be the first to admit that most of the tweets I harvest are from professionals involved in science or education (or both). And I can also see how easily homophily can infect my RSS reader too, as I direct it to intentionally pull out only RSS feeds that I want to read.

As I get the majority of my news from Google Reader, I have to wonder if my feeds are too homogenized and narrow-minded. I also have to wonder if my Twitter friends allow me to accept my own perspectives on life without confrontation or question. Are these tools just amplifying my own stupidity?

Of course, I am painting a fairly grim picture. Of course there are many benefits in developing social networks with kindred spirits; if anything, the internet is quite a useful tool in fostering this type of kinship. The danger lies in blocking out things that we need to see – diverse ideas, differing opinions and news from around the world.

Zuckerman suggests visiting sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbledUpon – sites that collect interesting stories and allow us to discover the world in its serendipity. I’d also suggest broadening your news feeds to include international news originating from different countries. Broaden your social network to include people from different professions and cultures. Allow yourself to be challenged by different opinions when people comment on your posts.

Why might we be concerned about homophily as educators? Think about it this way – you may seek out online diversity to become a better person, and in doing so, become a better teacher that is open minded, compassionate and has an abundant collection of fresh ideas. While you may not actually unearth a ready-to-go lesson plan, you may actually be able to share something about life that cannot be assessed on a standardized test.

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Grant Writing Tips

April 16, 2008 in Education | No comments

With shrinking school budgets, educators might consider looking to grants for project funds. Here are some tips (from the links below and from personal experience) for you if you are thinking of applying for a grant.

Preparation

  • Make sure your idea fits the grant criteria (location, non-equipment, etc)
  • Look for full grants and mini-grants too
  • May need to become member of professional organization(s) to be considered
  • Grants have two broad categories:
    • New proposals
    • Help to buildup existing projects
  • “Less is more” in proposal
  • Find colleagues as collaborators, community support
  • Look at successful proposals of other grant ideas
  • Find multiple uses of money, if possible
  • Involve students
  • Is your project sustainable beyond funding?
  • Gather ‘writing tools’
  • Success breeds success in grants

Writing

  • Use technical writing, not a creative writing style
  • Be clear and concise in writing style
  • Make sure to plan ahead and make the deadline, if not before
  • Display confidence & enthusiasm
  • Do your homework: research, cite studies that support your project
  • “Jargonize” appropriately
  • “Less is More” in writing
  • Develop specific, attainable goals in your project
  • Provide and timeline and a means for evaluation
  • Be prepared to showcase your successes already related to grant
  • Discuss potential problems and pitfalls
  • Consider your funding needs
  • Proofread! Avoid simple typos, misspellings, or awkward formatting
  • Critique your own proposal
  • Have others read your final draft as well
  • Turn in ON TIME (or ahead of time)

Follow-up

  • Some grants will contact you regardless of acceptance
  • Don’t get discouraged – a good idea is still worth doing. Look for other funding, try again next year
  • You may have a perfect idea/application and still get rejected
  • If rejected, ask grantor for comments/suggestions
  • If accepted, make sure to follow criteria for follow-up: report, publicity, etc

Links

Grant Sources (specifically science)

Do you have other ideas, or grant sources to share?

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Student Discussion Boards

February 29, 2008 in Education, Technology | No comments

My district has recently installed Microsoft Sharepoint.  This is a dynamic tool (albeit from the MotherShip) that allows me to create and control groups where users can collaborate though shared documents, discussions boards, blogs, and wikis (and many other features).

My initial observations of Sharepoint made me realize that it has a distinct Microsoft footprint – heavy on tools, but clunky to use.  It reminds me of that spoof video fantasizing if Microsoft had packaged the iPod.  In any case, I futzed around with it for a while until I was semi-satisfied.

I have to admit – the discussion board is a powerful tool.  It engages my students on a level that they would not comfortable with in the classroom.  It challenges them to raise questions they would not ask in class.  It actually brings more discussion into the classroom.  And this was only after a week of discussion.  (NOTE: the power of a discussion board is not new to me, but this is the first time I am able to use one under my district’s IT reign).

This is exactly a tool I have been looking for, as I have a colleague in Sweden who wants to have our classes collaborate on a project.  Since SKYPE is blocked, this would allow the students to actually have that collaboration – supervised by me and my Swedish colleague.

Sharepoint is quite powerful in that it allows multiple configurations for its users with many layers of permission.  There are a few no-brainers that I already have setup to protect my students.  First – they can only post, but can’t edit or delete their entries.  This helps to reinforce the idea that once something is posted on the internet, it is always there.  Secondly, I don’t allow anonymous outside registration either – outside registration would have to be added by me or would have to be requested.

But I am not clear how to setup other student permissions/identities and if I should allow outside access for viewing.  I have a few options:

  1. Lock down the site so that ONLY students in my class can see and participate in the discussions
  2. Lock down the site as above, but allow it to be viewed by any student or teacher in the district
  3. Allow outside viewing, but protect student identities – make them create unidentifiable usernames
  4. Other options?

If you use student discussion boards, what advice do you have?  What are the benefits and drawbacks of these configurations?  I want students to be safe, feel free to speak their mind, but I also want to emulate the outside world as well.

You can see what I’ve done (and what the students have done) so far.  Their identities are protected – so I am currently using option #3.  Most likely, these settings will change in the future. [Link]

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Interactive Whiteboarding

February 15, 2008 in Education, Technology | No comments

This school year, I was fortunate enough to have an interactive whiteboard (from Interwrite) installed in my classroom. I was hesitant to get it at first, as I would lose some valuable front-board real estate to have it mounted.

However, once I started using it, I soon found out some interactive and intriguing ways ways to enhance my instruction. Here’s what I like about it:

    1. More Student Interaction. I often find myself working too hard. That is, teaching to my students instead of working with them so that they can teach themselves. The IW has really helped to get students out of their seats and truly be more interactive in the lessons. Students love to write on the board, and it’s a great way to get students to contribute to the class.
    2. New Technology WOW Factor. There are only a handful of IW’s in the school right now, and students still think it’s a pretty cool gadget. It’s like I have the iPhone of education hanging on my wall (sorry for the metaphor).
    3. Great for Graphing. As a science teacher, I always have my students collect and graph data to analyze in class. The IW allows me to display graphs and write on them for analysis. The ‘write-on-able’ feature and the fact I can go back or save make the IW far superior to an overhead and some markers.
    4. Import Work and other Media. The IW allows me to easily import many types of media. This is particularly nice when working with online or CD-ROM textbooks, as I can incorporate media directly from student texts into my lessons. I can also use non-digital media, as we have a copy machine in our building that will scan documents and e-mail them to teachers.
    5. Save and Export Work. As I mentioned, I was a little cautious about losing some traditional whiteboard space. But I found that the IW actually expands this space, and I can create multiple pages and scroll back and forth. I can also record my movements on the IW to export them as a movie, and export the pages to a PDF file.
    6. Demonstration and Interactive Use of Programs. I particularly like to use RasMol for molecular imaging. I can use the same basic mouse functions on the IW to manipulate the molecule on the board, as well as certain structures with the IW pen. Here’s an exported video of me manipulating a GFP molecule with the IW.
    7. Interwrite Board + SMART Airliner Tablet = Extreme Whiteboarding! I still use traditional whiteboards integrated with the IW. I can assign multiple tasks for student groups to tackle on their own whiteboard, then take a picture of each and upload them to view. The students can present it on the board as I bring up their whiteboard picture. All the while, I am sitting in the back and can correct or add comments with a SMART Airliner Tablet or wireless keyboard/mouse. Again, the students produce, review and critique their entire lesson with my guidance.

Picture of Student Work:

Add Media11-20-after

Picture of Corrected Student Work:

11-20-before

If you can’tafford an interactive whiteboard this year, check out the economy solution – made from a Nintendo Wii [Link].

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Darwin Day Celebration

February 3, 2008 in Education, Science | No comments


Saturday, February 9th @ 7:00 PM
Lawrence University; Appleton, WI
Science Hall, Room 102

Please join us for this special Darwin Day event on Saturday, February 9th at Lawrence University. This event is designed to celebrate Darwin’s birthday and contributions to science. All students, educators and scientists are welcome. Food and door prizes will be provided.

Event Schedule
7:00 PM Keynote Presentations & Discussions (below)
8:30 PM Movie: Flock of Dodos
10:00 PM Social at the Viking Room on campus

Genetics and Speciation
Beth De Stasio, Raymond J. Herzog Professor of Science
& Associate Professor of Biology, Lawrence University
Using one or two recent examples, we will explore the connection between genetic change, phenotypic change, and speciation. Advances in our ability to dissect the genetic component of complex traits such as an organism’s morphology and color have allowed scientists to understand the changes that have led to reproductive isolation and subsequent speciation within particular populations. We will discuss the importance of reproductive isolation to speciation and mechanisms by which organisms can be isolated even when living in the same environment. Two examples will be explored.

Evo-devo and its contributions to Darwin’s legacy
Brigid O’Donnell, Postdoctoral Fellow of Biology, Lawrence University
Evolutionary developmental biology (or “evo-devo”) is a relatively new field of biological inquiry that elegantly illustrates both common ancestry and descent with modification in organic beings as envisioned by Charles Darwin. Evo-devo has provided us with a powerful perspective to explore the proximate mechanisms underlying the genesis of form as well as the evolutionary “tinkering” of developmental pathways across multiple scales of biological organization (from genes to entire structures!). I will highlight two specific case studies that have supplied exciting insights into the origin and evolution of the phenotype: the origin of body plans and the developmental basis of eyespot patterns in butterfly wings.

Coevolution of hosts and their parasites
Judith Humphries, Assistant Professor of Biology, Lawrence University
The coevolution of parasites and their hosts is often described as an “Arms Race”, where for example, the parasite evolves to increase the probability of infecting its host but in response, the host coevolves to better defend itself against the parasite. This is consistent with the “Red Queen Hypothesis” where both host and parasite must continually evolve in order to maintain fitness relative to each other. The relationship between parasitic brood birds such as cuckoos, and their hosts is often used to exemplify this hypothesis.

Please respond to president07@wsst.org if you plan to attend
Sponsored by Lawrence University and
The Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers

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Light, Liberty and Flickr

January 17, 2008 in Education, Technology | 2 comments

The Library of Congress has recently made a huge step in embracing such Web 2.0 concepts such as creativity, collaboration and sharing between users.

In an effort to provide better access to their collections, while symbiotically harvesting more information about those collections, the Library of Congress has created a Flickr page to host copyright-free pictures:

Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist…

…We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves.

More information is available on the Library’s Web site here and on the FAQ page here. You can read Flickr’s take here.

-from the Library of Congress Blog

While this is a tremendous offer, don’t forget about the slew of resources already available from the Library of Congress (including a section for teachers). Check them out for your classes and for yourself.

And there is also an underlying motive here. To help the Library on this project, Flickr has even created a new publication model for public collections called The Commons. Both the LOC and Flickr are hoping to encourage other public institutions to follow their lead. (In fact, the National Library of Australia is already doing a similar project with Picture Australia).

But of course, making these collections easily available has tremendous implications in education. This is a perfect way to teach about tagging and sharing in the classroom, while using historically important content without the worry of students accessing inappropriate content. And these pictures have no copyright restrictions, so they can easily be used by students and teachers in endless and creative ways in many classes. Too bad Flickr is blocked by Websense in my district.

What could you do with these pictures?

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Struggling… to Teach Better

December 21, 2007 in Education | No comments

In the recent issue of Edutopia (Nov/Dec 2007, Vol. 3, # 8), Mitch Martin describes about how a good teacher must be bad at something to be good at teaching (Mr. Martin’s Oopses, page 10). I must admit – I’ve been thinking about this article a lot lately in both teaching and beyond.

Martin describes his attempts at learning how to play guitar, in how he had juggle practicing with his family and job – all the while feeling the exact frustrations and distractions that his students experience in his classroom.

After reading that passage, I instantly remembered back to my student teaching seminar, when the professor asked us “how can you relate to students who don’t care about getting good grades?” Coming from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, most of us in the room were highly concerned with our grades. Getting grades was easy – empathizing with our students was hard.

After many years, I think that Martin offers at least a possible solution – put yourself in your students’ shoes. Translation: try something new where you might have to struggle a bit to succeed. Martin believes that “the best teachers are the ones who have struggled and succeeded.” I am reminded of a wise colleague of mine (now retired) who always told me that any good idea always starts with a LOT of fumbling and error.

So I challenge you all to make this your New Year’s resolution. Try something new – something in which you may have to struggle a bit in order to succeed. Not only will it enrich your life, but you’ll be able to better empathize with your students and it will make you a better teacher.

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