Presenting 2.0

We had a terrific (extended) meeting today of the Presenters Club about changes that we could make to the presentation - content and style of delivery. We're going to attempt a true v3.0 X-Fish presentation for the New Year, centered around a student brainstorm about why Atlantic Herring is important to the Gulf of Maine. That brainstorm will drive the different content/concepts that we talk about (fishing, food web, and current science). We'll also attempt polling to gather student information, during programs that allow for that time. The intro will also be revamped by using just Google Earth with embedded layers, placemarks, photos, and videos throughout the Gulf of Maine Watershed. We ordered a "Space Navigator" to make flying through Google Earth a breeze (hopefully). We'll keep you updated with our progress...and announce the launching of v3.0!

This week we are thankful for 86%

This week's Presenter's Club meeting followed a great program with a very different group, Longley Elementary from Lewiston. This school has a diverse group of students from Sudan, Africa, Morocco, and Asia - just to name a few. I had a great discussion with the teacher about the challenges that she faces in the classroom; cultural differences, non-English speaking students, wide range of academic abilities, low economic backgrounds, and non-existant parent support goups. She really enjoys bringing her students for the LabVenture! program, because it is something that they can all participate in on some level. A cultural difference that she noted was that many of her students aren't hands-on and see animals as being wild, not something that can be handled...including our X-Fish.

As a group we discussed ways that we could alter our presentation style to better engage ESL students, such as speaking slowly, shorter sentences, and simpler words.

This week we made some minimal changes to the 2hr presentation to include some more student artifacts, and discussed ways to engage teachers during LabVenture! through conversation and paritipating in the program at empty stations when we have smaller groups (testing out Lobsters was a possibility).

But we saw both of these topics; presentation changes and engaging teachers as a much bigger discussion, so they became topics for future weeks:

Presentation changes (likes/dislikes, new content, new styles, different ways of using powershow) is next week's topic of discussion (Dec 2nd during lunch).

Fostering teacher relationships will be another topic that we'll get to in December as well.

Wow...December already! Again, if you're interested, you are all more than welcome to contribute.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Welcome to the Presenters Club

Hi all...we're going to revive this blog by using it to archive our weekly Presenters Club meetings. This meeting (lunchtimes on Tuesdays) gives us a chance to reflect on what has happened during LabVenture! presentations, work together on making improvements and changes, and share articles and news.

By Blogging this it will give you a chance to see what we're up to besides hosting 2 LabVenture! programs each day. And also, if you see any topics/questions/ideas where you'd like to participate or contribute to - let us know.

Nov. 18th
Today's Topic was how to best use this time, and potential future topics.
We decided to focus on one topic per week, and to have task items to complete by the next week.
Decided on opening questions:
Any changes to the presentation? Any you would like to make?
Anything stand out from last weeks visits?
Decided on Closing question:
What will next week's topic be?
Potential future topics: how to best use the teacher kiosk, major changes to current presentation style and content, future lobster presentation, teacher talking points, interesting articles to read and share...

Next week's Topic: Teacher talking points and quick revisions to the 2hr presentation.

Stay tuned...

Sushi and bar coding

If you have not seen it, a very interesting article about a couple of hs students who took dna samples of fish in sushi restaurants and found that 25 percent of the samples were mislabeled: half of the restaurant samples and six out of 10 grocery store samples. In every case, less desirable or cheaper fish was substituted for its more expensive counterpart.

The technology they used, genetic bar coding, and the organization they send the samples to, The Barcode for Life, might have implications for species ids for exotic species.

The original article is in the NYT here.

Interesting use of citizen scientists

The European Space Agency (ESA) has just posted a large number of pictures of Mars that were shot with "a non-scientific camera." They are looking for people to analyze the photos and post comments on what they see.


More information about this (it is really quite interesting) can be found here.

The site for accessing the photos is here.

The site is not very user friendly but this is an interesting concept.

Interesting use of videos

The University of Nottingham has just created a whole periodic table of elements, with each element being a video by the scientists about that element. Quite entertaining and educational. When you have a moment, take a look at site.

Below is the video for hydrogen:



Imagine a map of the Gulf of Maine with videos by fishermen, scientists, policy makers, and educators. Could be quite nice as a follow-up for the bus (click on areas along your route for a video about "Fill in the blank.").

Milfoil Video For VS

Here is a video that VS folks would like to save:

Touch screens defined

This appears to be a really nice primer on the various kinds of touch screens and their pros and cons. Check out the article at this site. A must read for the CCIL (lets see what Tom thinks of it).

Flip Video Test

While writing about purple loosestrife and water chestnuts, I took the opportunity to interview some of the science staff about the work they were doing on the second floor using the new Flip video camera. The camera is great! The video quality is quite good and it makes uploads to YouTube a one button experience.

We definitely need one for the science staff to take into the field.

The proof is in the pudding, so here are the videos below:

Nicole speaks about her work looking at cod stomach contents.



And Dan on copepods.

A Vision of K-12 Students

I found this video on YouTube and thought you all might enjoy it, if you haven't seen it already.

Sharing videos online

If you weren't at Shelly's talk today - then you missed a very cool dogfish video that sparked a very cool idea.

Hopefully as a result of this summer's HV workshop we are going to have schools sharing information about their local aquatic habitats on a shared My Maps.

As a result of the pressure to provide content on the bus, we are going to start collecting videos and other media content.

Since it would be great to have the bus content available in some format to teachers online, we can post media that is collected on My Maps based on where it came from (for example - Shelly's dogfish video from wherever in the GoM that she did her research).

This would allow students and teachers to not only explore the GoM by viewing the different aquatic habitats in the watershed - but also by seeing some of the science that is happening throughout the GoM.

Another possible layer would be schools that participated in LabVenture!

Besides collecting the content (which we will already be doing for the bus programming), this is relatively easy to do.

When I set up the account for teachers to share their aquatic habitat info on a My Maps - I'll be sure to set it up in a way that we can easily create different Maps (Science in the GoM), or layers, that can be shared online!

Bus Programming

As we all know, in order to get Bangor students to the Cohen Center, we need to come up with programming for the bus, and soon! Here is a running list of ideas. Feel free to add/remove as appropriate. Also, as far as saving video clips, etc, there is a folder on the shared drive Education>CCIL>Bus Programming. Throw everything in there so we all have easy access to it!

-venue for BWET on the way home

-21st century information literacy and visual literacy need to be developed

-video bios of presenters/scientists as well as other marine science related careers

-"Let's Go Lobstering" video

-Blue Planet GOM segment

-videos on GoogleEarth and how it works

-what to expect when they arrive at GMRI

-explore NOAA resources, tie in to watersheds

-survey validity of websites

-interactive trivia games

-take CCIL experiences & processes and apply them to other learning experiences

-student input:

*different colored cards?

*maybe clickers in the next round

Things to keep in mind:

-don't want to burn the kids out before they get here

-align with MLRs

We will discuss this with AGILe on August 13th, please come with ideas!

YouTube annotations

Nifty stuff! Very easy to use and intuitive! I can see lots of uses for this.

Here is the bridge peregrine falcon footage I've been working up.

YouTube Video Annotations

If you have not seen it yet, YouTube has a new feature with video annotations that allows you to add interactivity to any YouTube video you have. It is a pretty slick feature that could have some great educational potential.

You can read more about it here. Here is an examples of it being used (you'll need your imagination since these are not educational uses, per se):

Magic card trick

If we could use YouTube's engine to run the web site for the CCIL student uploads (non-profits can do this via a program at YouTube and thereby gain control of what is put on the site), I could imagine this as a powerful tool for CCIL and VS students to manipulate and share their findings.

The Tech Museum (Take Two)

Last Friday I was able to make another pilgrimage to the Tech Museum in San Jose, California. Although I only had a little over an hour and the exhibit designer I was meeting with had to leave after just a few minutes to deal with a crisis, I once again left feeling that these exhibits are what GMRI is striving to do and that we should make a concerted effort to learn more about their work.

As a reminder, you use your museum ticket at a scanner at many of the exhibits. Anything you do at the exhibit will then be saved to your own personal web site. To see some of the exhibits I visited, you'll need to go to this site and enter my code, 99000000006660826823 (use cut and paste to make it easy!). Explore around and you can see what I did at the museum.

For example, I took DNA from a bioluminescent jellyfish and inserted it into a bacteria, thereby creating glowing bacteria. I plated out the bacteria and then the staff at the museum took a picture of the glowing bacteria once they had 24 hours to grow (you could also see bacteria at the station that had grown already). This is what it looks like:



Here is a video I shot in January of what the experience at the station is like:


You can also send e-mail postcards from many of the pages you create...a neat feature.

You can also modify the materials you upload at different kiosks around the museum to create your own, personal web site. I did a very lame one as I had to vamoose to a meeting and did not have much time to create (you'll need to be logged in to see the page).

There was also a fun 3-D scan I did of my head, proving exactly how follically challenged I am. You need to be on a PC to view this, however, so tough luck to mac users at this point.

I was not able to get a lot of information from the exhibit designer about the workings of the exhibits but did find out that they:

-develop the exhibits quickly, on the order of 1-2 months (some exhibits take longer)
-many are html based, with Flash video embeds
-people outside the institution develop some of the kiosks (the genetics kiosk was done by some research staff at Stanford in collaboration with The Tech staff).

Bottom line is that we need to learn more about what these folks are doing and how they do it. I know Dana is familiar with their work through AAM but I think it would be great with all the trips we are making as an organization to California to see it for ourselves. Perhaps a pilgrimage for Tom to make some professional connections?

Cool Lesson Idea

One of the teachers from Wells told Dave and I about a cool lesson idea yesterday. She has the kids make up random longitude and latitudes and find them on the map. They then record if their location was on land or in the ocean. The next step is to compile the whole classes findings and to figure out what percent of the locations were on the ocean. The kids learn geography, percentages and that the world is ~75% ocean!

New Google Earth layer

Google Earth now has a new layer for showing climate change. You can read more about it and download the KML file here. I just played with it a bit with an overlay over Maine and the results are thought provoking to say the least. Just try moving the slider over to 2085 to see what I mean! The snowbirds will be going to Kittery then.

Here you can hear Prime Minister Gordon Brown talking about the release.

Making a Difference in Public Schools

http://onceuponaschool.org/?page_id=191

I came across this and thought is was a cool thing. Its filled with lots of pledges and stories of how people are working with public schools to make a difference in the students learning.

Piscine update

Here is the latest update on the fish:

• I finally got a hold of John. He apologized for not getting back to me sooner (I've had calls into him for 2 weeks) but he told me that he has been "all-out-working" at providing bait for lobsterman. This is a new business venture for him but he says with the cost of herring right now that lobstermen are moving to other kinds of bait, namely freshwater baitfish like suckers, shiners, and minnows. John says he never imagined this happening but he says it is quite profitable!

• On the smelt front, John confirmed that the microsporidian (as with just about every microsporidian I have had the pleasure of meeting) is untreatable. He also confirmed that it is found in all smelt but only expresses itself for unknown reasons, but most likely due to some kind of stress. He does not know how it will play out in our tanks as he does not hold fish for long at his facility in closed-water conditions like ours.

• John has about 500-600 rainbow smelt in holding for us. He said he has had them in holding since I called a few eeks ago but just did not have a chance to call back. They are ready for pick-up as early as Tuesday.

• John also has a lot of golden shiners (Notemigonus cysoleucas) and suckers (Catostomus commersonii). Both of these species would look good in the tank, can feed on artificial food, and school very tightly (more so than the smelt). The only change we would need to make to what we do now is change the tank over to a purely freshwater exhibit. This could be done cheaply and easily (plumbing changes and some extra equipment) and we would no longer need to do water runs at MARICAL (cost savings for freshwater equipment). The risk is we have not tried these species and we do not have another holding space for backup.

Recommendations:

• See if John can hold rainbow smelt for us for a period of 1 month as backup species.
• Change tank over to shiners, suckers, or both.
  

LVS4 Notebooks

One of the 3-ring binders at LVS4 is broken and will not make it through very many more visits. Does anyone know if there is a spare anywhere? Or where we may be able to buy a new one?

Assistance for Hearing Impaired Students

We noticed today that though we have the iListen devices to assist hearing impaired students during the presentation, we have nothing with which to help them out at the stations besides just turning up the volume. TomO had the idea that we should rig up a headset splitter at each station with an individual volume control. Perhaps this could be taken care of over the summer?

Cohen Center Maintenance

This is a running list of things we think of that need to be taken care of in the Cohen Center:

-Camera and wide angle lens at 1-3 (note: other cameras are getting loose as well)
-Camera casings for fish cameras at LVS3 need to be sanded and repainted
-Address the source of black dust at LVS3
-New way of affixing microphones at LVS2
-General deep clean
-Replace light blubs above 3-3, 2-1, 2-3
-Replace blue rope lights in bleachers?
-Clean projectors and remove cobwebs that connect them :)

Interesting Article

Just read this article last night in the latest issue of The New Yorker. I've uploaded it to the blog server and the article can be downloaded here.

Some interesting food for thought on innovation!

One last one...

Just a last observation. I really liked some of the exhibits at MBA where monitors are not just simple rectangles. Below is an image of a touchscreen/touchwall interactive in the new Splash Zone area. The face behind each of the googles is a small video screen so the people's eyes blink and move. A small touch, but a very nice one. There were many, many examples of this in some of the new work and I noticed that the public found it fun and engaging, with a sense of discovery.

Integration of blog and TGM in CCIL

I would LOVE to integrate the blog more with TGM. Would folks who present on the floor be willing to write up their presentations as blog posts?

BTW, the Word Press software interface has been VERY finicky as to format and input, but it is getting better and better with each new iteration. I mention this because I have been acting as the conduit to the blog mainly because a misplaced code or wrongly formatted picture and throw off the format of the whole blog! Right now the easiest way to get the material onto the blog is by sending a post (text and still and video assets) to me.

Nice Touch Tank

On an MBA theme here. Really liked their new touch tank for the Splash Zone exhibit. Acrylic lids on top so animals can be touched and rotated but the animals below can rest, nice use of side views, and good integration of video camera.

I mention it as I think the fusion of a LVS with a touch tank could be quite interesting...


Monitor/camera view

Side view into pool.

Low level for kids and ADA.

Plexiglass cover (animals below and above)

Side view

Not such good use of technology

MBA has a (fairly) new exhibit on exploring the deep sea called Mission to the Deep. There are 3 missions that you can choose from in the immersion theater. Each participant has a touch screen that allows one to put input or explore an aspect of the mission.

I don't know how many of you have seen it, but I found it rather flat. The room is very high-tech and flashy (see video below), but the interaction and quality of experience did almost nothing for me. For example, in one of the missions called "Investigate A Sunken Whale," you explore the carcass of a dead whale on the bottom of the ocean. This is mind bendingly cool thing (even if it sounds gross!) because these whale falls, as they are technically known, provide a unique habitat for a variety of animals, some of which are only found on dead whales. How these organisms find (recruit) dead whales is just one of the many questions that are presently being asked. However, the touch screen experience was simply clicking on and identifying these organisms...a pretty uninteresting activity in my mind.

I find comparison/contrast of exhibits fascinating, especially where technology is involved. MBA excels at live animal display but they are still learning the ropes on the technology end of things (although they hit home runs on some of their technology exhibits, like the Real Choice Cafe and Live From the Deep programs).


Mission To The Deep room.

Schooling tank at MBA

Below are some videos of the schooling tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I thought you might find it interesting as this exhibit shows very tight schooling behavior with the anchovies and because the exhibit was the inspiration for the CCIL schooling tank (it has the same dimensions and general design). You are more than welcome to the full-quality video if you want to use it for CC presentation.


Schooling tank (far view)


Schooling tank (close view that allows you to see filter feeding)

This is only a test

Just seeing if the RSS feed I just set up will work. If you got an email letting you know I posted this then it does! It should also notify you when comments are posted, just to keep us all current.

Cohen Center in the News

Did anyone catch or have a tape of the news from Tuesday on Channel 8? My dad said there was a great little segment on GMRI and the Cohen Center on the 6 o'clock news...maybe on the 11pm as well?

Ambient DVD

Sarah mentioned the other day that it would be nice to have a seasonally appropriate ambient DVD for the cohen center. Any Ideas? I was thinking that it might be cool if we recorded a few hours of a tidal cycle. It could be an interesting conversation starter with the teachers without being distracting to the kids! "That's my opinion, we welcome yours!" -Fred Nutter

Gloves

Dave and I were discussing the amount of waste that is associated with Cohen Center operations and ways to decrease it. We were wondering how necessary the use of gloves will be with the new content (lobster). Our idea was to only provide gloves to students who have shellfish allergies? I assume that if we do decide that the students will be handling lobsters at one (or more) of the stations that the permission slip with have some sort of disclaimer about allergies? We could use this as a way to determine what students needed gloves?

Staff development

Is there enough flexibility in next years schedule to have days without visits? I know its tight, but if we had a Monday off once in a while we could do things like staff retreats, education meetings, and staff development. If this was a possibility are there any ideas of places we could visit?

Team icons

I just put up the team icons vote on the blog. Go have a vote!

Generic Google Account

I created a generic Google account for those of us without Google accounts to sign on to the blog. Potentially it could also be a way for teachers or others to access the blog without us having to extend reader privileges to each individual. To use it, simply sign on to read the blog as:

gmri.education@gmail.com

Password: cohencenter

Hope this helps!

Seacoast Science Center

We stopped in at the Seacoast Science Center on Saturday to check out their exhibits and their new Gregg Interactive Learning Studio. Although the studio was not active when I was there, I think it would be interesting to get a group from our staff down to see a demonstration of the facilities capabilities (they are only 1 hour away from the lab). They are currently running 4 programs: Gulf of Maine, American Lobster, Horseshoe Crab, and Coastal Creatures Adaptations.

You can read more at this case study.

Sir Ken Robinson on Driving Creativity Out of Kids

When you have a free 20 minutes, you might enjoy this talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

Guinea piglets

If you need a spiffy new camera or GPS to do whatever whenever this spring, ask a Sarah if you can borrow one. In turn, we'll ask for your feedback on the easy & sticky aspects of using it. Better yet if you need a camera to photograph your pet Asian shore crab....

VS Teacher Recruitment

We'd appreciate some group input on our approach to recruiting our first cohort of Vital Signs teachers. Initially we thought we'd recruit for the Teacher Institute, but have since changed our approach to recruit for Year 1 participation. This announcement of sorts will be distributed by email to the MMSA list serve, teachers we've already targeted, etc.

Feedback:
What are your questions after reading this? What questions will teachers have for us? Where are the holes?
Layout? [note that the bullets, spacing, etc. don't play nicely with Blogger]
Length? Too wordy? What would you cut?
Does it capture your attention? If not, ideas how.
Anything and everything else.

------------------------------

Vital Signs
Real Students. Real Science.

A unique opportunity for grades 7 & 8 science teachers

The Gulf of Maine Research Institute is offering Maine science teachers a unique opportunity to partner with us in the design, development, and implementation of our new Vital Signs program for students in grades 7 & 8. [See Program Overview below]

12 teachers and their students will work closely with GMRI educators, scientists, and technologists to shape Vital Signs program direction, inform curriculum, evaluate technology components, and contribute to the initial dataset of a statewide long-term ecological research project.

This first cohort of Vital Signs teachers will be invited to a 3-day introductory Teacher Institute in August 2008. Teachers and students will partner with GMRI educators through the 2009-2010 school year to implement, evaluate, and refine Vital Signs.

Vital Signs Teacher Institute

Who: 7^th and 8^th grade science teachers

When: August 18, 19 & 20, 2008

Where: Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Portland

Highlights:

§ Connect with the scientific community
Practice inquiry instruction
Become familiar with Vital Signs technology & curriculum resources
Do authentic field work in freshwater and coastal systems
Understand local, regional, & global invasive species issues

Perks:

§ Suite of Vital Signs field equipment
30 Contact Hours awarded upon workshop completion
150 stipend upon workshop completion
Lodging in Portland’s Old Port provided on 8/18 and 8/19 for those from away
Mileage reimbursed

Please express interest by June 1, 2008 to:
Contact person name
Phone
Email

Vital Signs Program Overview
Vital Signs is an authentic inquiry-based, field science education program that links 7^th and 8^th grade students and scientists in the rigorous collection and analysis of essential environmental data across freshwater and coastal ecosystems. Innovative technology, relevant content, and critical partnerships create an authentic science learning experience for students, a distributed data gathering network for scientists, and a statewide community of teachers, students, and scientists collaborating to learn about and steward the Gulf of Maine watershed.

More: http://gmri.org/education/vitalsigns.asp

New Team Icons

We were discussing the possibility of new team icons for Lobster content, as we probably wouldn't want to have a team Lobster. Meredyth and I vote for team Harbor Seal, Dave thinks team Cod or team Atlantic Herring...other ideas, comments?

Welcome to our blog!

This blog was created in response to last night's AGILe meeting. This is a forum for us to share ideas and innovations in an easily accessible and stream-of-consciousness form. It is only open to those of us here for now but potentially this could be a forum that opens up to teachers and other educators as well. On here we will share ideas we have while on the floor here in the Cohen Center and hope to hear from you at your desk upstairs as well.

Enjoy and happy writing!