We’re supposed to be honest. I will be as honest as I can about this…

DSA’s science department has a set of laptops that were purchased when DSA was formed…in 1995. We’ve kept them going for word processing, general (basic) web research, and email. We’ve increased their RAM as much as we can and removed all of the superfluous software that we can so we can get some use out of them. They will barely run LoggerPro with our Vernier probes. It’s that bad. I/we do what we can. I will take the students to one of the computer labs to use newer machines when it’s appropriate, but much of the time, we need to be in a science classroom to do the activity that computer access could enhance!

We have a technology fund this year, so we should get at least one laptop cart for the department…if not two. I’ve only ever taught for DSA, so this is a hard question to answer. I’ve only been able to teach kids to create graphs in Excel and do very simple computer operations. Sigh. I can’t require a lot of computer use from my students at home because, even though they have access to newer computers in our labs and our media center, they might not have access at home.

So. I have no idea. I great deal of my fellowship relies upon my ability to teach students how to use statistical software, R. Can I answer this one during the school year?

I think there are many ways for me to use the technology introduced at NCCAT last week.

There were a lot of interesting new ways to immediately access student learning. I will probably use padlet and socrative to anonymously communicate with my class as it’s happening.

I require an Environmental Law Infosheet for part of my students’ AP Environmental Science project. I have included on my class website two of the three infosheet websites suggested in one of the Kenan talks as possible assistants for my students’ projects. I hope some of them will use these resources.

Frankly, though…the most useful thing was to talk with other positive, like-minded teachers. There is too much negativity in teaching. I am lucky that we don’t have as much at my school as there seems to be in others. Still, a week with people who are intent upon improving their best practices by collaboration and discussion is worth more than anything else to me.

Well, that and rafting. (:

I am creating curriculum about climate change with the help of statisticians at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute in RTP. Dr. Richard Smith had graciously agreed to mentor me for my Kenan Fellowship year. The essential question of this project is reflected in the title of the externship and fellowship offer: “Climate Extremes: Are storms larger, more frequent, or both?”

What I hope to design is a unit plan that includes background information about climate change, specifically from professionals researching and using climate information; the use of statistics in climate science and some reasons why climate statistics and interpretation are sometimes considered controversial in the lay community; an understanding of line of best fit and the concept of regression; hand calculations of the value of r2 as a measurement of the relationship between values in a data set; use of statistical freeware such as R; correctly extrapolating and interpolating values on a graph including r2; and teaching line of best fit (as it applies to climate data) to younger students.

(As soon as Dr. Smith returns from his 4th of July holiday, I will add a picture of the two of us!)

I’ve been thinking about what this unit plan needs to look like. It’s important that the cumulation of the unit is the application of what I can glean from working with Richard at SAMSI. Statistics is a difficult subject even for adults with fully developed, sophisticated, abstract thinking…for students with less developed abstract understanding, this will be a challenge.

I’ve been writing the overall unit plan. I was really concerned about how to do this, but the template seems to be making short work of this. (Although I may, as in all things, being a little too verbose.) It’s always good to force myself to think about how  and why I plan things the way I do. As I teach the same materials over years, I keep changing (and I hope improving) what I do with a particular curriculum, and this process is giving me a new way to do this.

I am not a math teacher. I’ve barely been trained as one, and yet it’s an integral part of teaching science well. For me, math is (at least partially) intuitive. I know it is not this way to many people. And this is the piece that is missing for many students. They may love science but not be able to apply mathematical concepts to their ideas. That marriage is what scientists need to be able to do! This project is forcing me to think about how to explain a mathematical concept clearly, simply, and frankly to students who probably have little to no formal understanding of statistics. Most kids understand more of stats than they think, just from reading news. I hope to access some of this.

I’ve started the summer with a three-day seminar about climate change and curriculum development sponsored by UNC Chapel Hill and NASA. It requires that I develop a lesson by next summer (!) for CEUs. This is a very full seminar. We’ve visited the Duke/NCSU research site on the NC Forest Service plot in Duke Forest, listened to a presentation about FORWARN, both of which seem very useful for my Kenan project. Very, very glad I opted to do this.