Week Four - Kids and Cadavers

Well, to be honest I was really interested in some of the Intime video clips but had many troubles accessing them from the school computers as well as my laptop at home. I did review the associated materials for the lesson titled, QX3 Computer Microscope Project. The project revolves around using computer microscope hardware from Intel to learn about a chosen biology topic and then prepare a powerpoint to demonstrate the knowledge gained. Just cruising the site, I found the ideas helpful but would probably "tweak" most of them to fit my style. In addition, some of the links were outdated and didn't work (the Intel link for example) and I tend to like more concrete examples and ideas, rather than vague descriptions like "students will explore new areas of biology in which they are interested". Now I do need to take a step back - maybe the video itself gives those concrete answers and the links can easily be found with a little more searching. For now, I think that Intime would be useful when I'm not feeling the most creative and I need a little impetus to try something different. At that point I might go to Intime lessons for some new ideas.

On another completely unrelated note, I had great success in class when I was gone at the Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers Convention this past week. I was out of the classroom Thursday and Friday and utilized SlideShare to present notes that my students needed to take from a powerpoint of mine. I didn't want to leave my passwords out there for the sub to access my files and I also didn't want to have every slide of the powerpoint available to the students. With SlideShare, I copied only the targeted slides for each day and then in the sub notes left a URL for each day's notetaking session. When I returned on Monday, my students only needed a little redirection and focus on the notes and I didn't have to labor over giving a whole block of notes in one sitting. In addition, they were being productive while I was gone! (This was a big relief as my current biology students are a little squirrely to say the least...)

The convention itself was a great jumping off point as I found out about many new and not so new technologies and tools. For example, there is a site called Teacher's Domain, hosted by the Educational Communications Board for the state. It is set up to search all public access information (mostly in science, but expanding to other disciplines) and from there a teacher can create lessons and groups. In the groups you can save certain sites and objects to file and post student instructions for each item. The beauty of the site is that teachers, students and parents can all access the information for free, there is no software to download and all of the resources are public domain. It was an awesome learning experience for me and another tool I can add to my expanding kit of technology. There were many other tools taught at the convention as well. If a teacher out there doensn't already know about it, visit the Jason Project - it's geared towards middle school science but has great potential for cross-curricular integration.

The absolute highlight for me was a visit to the Marquette University Human Gross Anatomy Lab for a 3 hour lecture/lab combo. (For anyone with a queasy stomach, you may want to navigate away from my blog at this point, because I'm going to describe what I did...) With all of the positive applications of technology in teaching, I had the opportunity to do the old fashioned hand's on version. We had a brief lecture before heading into the lab where I had the chance to see and investigate a number of bodies with the grad and undergrad students facilitating. I held a human heart in my hands and watched a craniotomy. It was astounding (and humbling) to think of what a perfect machine the human body is. The experience also served to remind me of two things. The first is that the human specimens I was privledged to see and learn from benefitted from technology - I saw brain shunts, pacemakers and artificial joints. The second was that in some instances there is no technology that can replace or substitute for an actual experience with all of the external stimuli (sights, sounds, smells) and the internal emotional reaction.