During each day of big meetings like NSTA every person comes away with a different view of what’s going on. Here are a couple of notes from my day.
Brennan Sapp, Kyla Hawkin, Mary Louise Pozaric and Rosemary Brown from Northern Kentucky presented a CSI-type simulation that they were using in Dixie Heights High School classrooms where they had added fourteen sections on forensics. The session was well-attended and session materials are available on the web.
Presenter Brennan Sapp stressed that the key to creating this type of exercise was to set up a single crime scene in one room for students to investigage, give them lots of information about the scenario, and test roles personally. Sapp related that students routinely did not spot things like, for example, a bullet pounded into a white wall. He suggested that students should be encouraged to focus on everyday areas that might be different even though they might “overall” look the same.
Teachers at the Yahoo! workshop.
At the Yahoo! exibit booth instructional designer Karon Weber and colleagues were demonstrating the new Yahoo teachers site featuring the prototype Gobbler™.
“This easy-to-use site and peer network has been designed by and for teachers.” Potential users were encouraged to sign up and try it out when the site goes live.
In an afternoon workshop the intensive development process Yahoo! undertook with teachers in developing the Gobbler™ was reviewed and recreated. Weber answered the question, “What is the payoff for Yahoo?” She reiterated that Yahoo! is a leader in information technology and saw that their resources should be utilized to meet teachers’ needs. Their motivation lies in the creation of an educational “community of generosity” where intellectual property is shared, respected, and credited. Content that is gathered by teachers using the Gobbler™ is not stored centrally, but rather referenced.
Yahoo! has created a tool that they believe will allow educators to create high-quality curricula quickly and easily.
Left to right: The new publication on display; Ted Willard, “Chief Cartographer” for the AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy project, and; Peg Keeley.
The day concluded with receptions celebrating the release of the second volume of AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy and an NSDL ice cream social networking event.
The incoming NSTA president, Peg Keeley, was on hand to offer her congratulations. Keeley, Senior Science Specialist with the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance and is the PI on the NSDL Project “PRISMS Phenomena and Representations for Instruction of Science in Middle Schools.” About the PRISMS project: http://www.project2061.org/publications/2061Connections/2005/2005-01b.htm.
[…] I have been thinking about science on television when a colleague remarked that the big theme at this year’s meeting of the National Science Teachers Association was forensics. The exhibit hall was all about packaging science lessons into crime scenes, she said, and the teachers she spoke with explained that their students were coming into class full of questions after watching shows like “CSI.” This is easy to explain. A recent article in Popular Science estimated that the big four networks are running 15 successful prime-time dramas this season in which medicine, science, or technology play a defining role. During the entire decade of the 1990s, there were only ten science-based dramas. […]
[…] Some digital education providers have already jumped on the bandwagon. An archived Expert Voices blog called Boneyard Science: Investigating Forensics has lots of interesting links, and a new site called Eforensics is being developed by the Eskeletons team at the University of Texas. The forensics theme was everywhere at the National Science Teachers Association meeting this year, and the teachers we spoke with said they were packaging chemistry and physics lessons as crime investigations because their students had gotten all jazzed up by “CSI.” So what’s the problem? […]
God is the foundation of evil.