Thing 6: Animation

I think the students could have a blast with this one.  Short videos could also be really nice as class openers, a good "hook" to get the students involved in the discussion of the day.

I tried it out by creating a short video in which an elephant and a giraffe debate the relative ecological importance of predators and parasites.


Parasites vs. Predators by jausema on GoAnimate

Thing 9: Taming the Web

Screencast-o-matic presents interesting features that it had never occurred to me to use.  I do often explain the features of a particular website to students, since there are many excellent websites for teaching science concepts, especially topics like genetics, cellular energetics, biodiversity, and plate tectonics.  Typically I will take a few minutes in class to highlight the features of a site, but if a student is not paying attention or is absent I either need to re-explain it later or ask another student to give them the low-down.  I could use this feature to record a short website tour, then post it for students to view if they need a refresher, if they are absent, or if we run out of time in class.

The "pro" features could be useful, but would not really be necessary for someone who had Camtasia or similar software.  I used Harry's copy to try out Camtasia, and I think it would be worthwhile for the school to buy a site license.

I tried out doing a video tour of a PBS website on plate tectonics called "Savage Earth"  It seems to work just fine, except that there is no audio because I did not have a microphone available.  I have one, but it's at school and I am trying this out at home.  I think I will try this again later for explaining some other assignments - I often use web interfaces for homework and for lab explorations in class.  The "publish to YouTube" option looks interesting and could be useful.  I suppose if you publish to a file you would be able to edit/save/re-post in whatever manner you want - also potentially useful.  But a microphone is a must in order to take advantage of this!

Thing 10: Instapaper

The features and uses of several of these "things" are beginning to blur together, at least as I am thinking about them.  Instapaper sounds like an interesting concept.  I have often struggled what to do with sommething on the web that I want to read later.  Usually I save a link in my browser or send an email link to my personal email account, expecting to have more time at home.  This works reasonably well.  The advantage of Instapaper is that it would be accessible from any browser, and I would not have extra email messages cluttering up my inbox.  However, the way I envision using this service is very similar to how I would see using Diigo - that, too, is a service for saving and organizing websites to be used/view later.  I suppose Diigo has the added "social" element of allowing one to share lists, but as I pointed out in my post on the topic, I can't see any advantage to using that feature, at least in a classroom setting.

Anyway, I created an Instapaper account and I will see how it works for a while.  I have not yet tried accessing it from my Ipad but I will come back to this post and update after I have done so.  I did encounter one problem - I was unable to drag the "read later" button to the bookmarks bar in Chrome, which is my preferred browser these days.  It worked fine in Firefox.  After doing some searching I found another approach.  Chrome has an extension available called "defer".  This extension installs a button that can be linked to Instapaper as well as several similar services.  Here is where I read about how to use "defer"  It does work now with my Chrome browser.  I am interested to see how well it works at school, where I will be on a different computer but can sign in to my Google account within Chrome.

Below is a screen shot of the instructions.  Other services it works with are called "Pocket, Readability, Kippt, Pinboard and Buffer"  (I have not heard of any of these before ).

Here are a couple of items on my Instapaper account.  Still not school-related - I have travel on the brain.

UPDATE: I was able to get to my instapaper page/list from the iPAD, but I could not save additional pages to read later.  There is an App available, but at $3.99 I need to decide whether it's worth paying for.  The link did show up on my Chrome browser at school.

Thing 8: Hearing is believing

I have been thinking about experimenting with some "flipped classroom' approaches for a couple of years now, but with limited time to work on alternative approaches, I have not made much progress yet.  However, this fall I have an extra reason to give it a try - I will be missing three days of class in September in order to travel to Acadia National Park for an educator's conference.  I made a similar trip 2 years ago, to Glacier National Park.  Not wanting my students to get behind, I assigned them a project that in other years I have used as a semester-ending "capstone", and asked them to read/study the appropriate chapter from the text on their own time.  This year, I wanted to try something different, so last spring I recorded several segments of my lectures on biodiversity with Camtasia.  The recordings do not contain much in the way of editing - they consist mostly of me narrating the slides and graphics, explaining the concepts as if I were teaching the material "live".  I have uploaded these presentations to Screencast, and plan to assign the students to watch them while I am gone.  I have divided the material from the chapter into several smaller segments, so that each lecture is 15-20 minutes long.

Depending on how well the recorded lecture works, I might try it again later in the school year.  There are many labs and activities that I would like to try in my classes but have a hard time fitting them in do to time constraints.  Using a flipped approach might make it possible.

Below is a screenshot from the lecture I linked to.

Thing 3: notes

I have never used a service like Diigo before, so this is uncharted territory.  I do like the idea of being able to tag/save/store files for later review.  I often come across interesting websites and it can be a challenge to figure out how to index and organize them.  My usual approach has been to save sites in an intricate nested hierarchy of bookmarks.  One challenge with that approach is that I had a completely different set of bookmarks one my home computer than at school - until I started using Chrome, which allows users to synch bookmarks across any computer they are using.

I saved a few sites to Diigo.  These are totally unrelated to teaching - they are travel sites, with an eye towards some future vacations!

I am not sure how much I would use Diigo.  I don't see it as a useful teaching took, except for organizing research on a particular topic.  I would not, for example, share my list of interesting sites with my students.  Much easier to do that by putting links to useful sites in an html file and uploading it to my school website.

Thing 5: Beyond Power Point

I admit that I use power point frequently while teaching.  I think it's a great medium for communicating biology concepts, because images are so important to learning this content: diagrams of complex processes like the carbon cycle and microscopic phenomena like cellular metabolism are brought to life with images.  I have a lot of time invested in my power points, and spend quite a bit of time refining them each year, so I hesitate to begin using another format.  I have been aware of Prezi for perhaps a year now, and while I find the format interesting because of it's "otherness", I am not convinced at this point that it's "better" than a traditional linear power point.  However, "better" is not necessarily the point - variety can be a good thing.  So I created an account and made a Prezi.  I noticed that one can upload power point slides an manipulate them, so I tried using a portion of my slides on water pollution.  This Prezi focuses on 4 primary types of water pollutants, symbolized by the acronym TONS.

The transition was not smooth.  One thing I discovered is that much of my text had to be re-formatted in order to fit onto the Prezi slides.  I don't have a lot of time to work on it now, but at least I have the basics down.  There's a fairly steep learning curve here, it appears, and I consider myself fairly computer-savy.  Anyway, here it is.

Thing 7: Videos

I came across TubeChop and similar services last year, so I tried it for a couple of videos.  I wanted to show a short segment from a a ~30 minute show, highlighting how a "retired" landfill was becoming host to a type of solar panel that can be unrolled like a giant tarp.  I was planning to insert the clip here, but I realized that the version of my power point available on the school web page is older, so I can't access it from home.  Instead, here is a short clip of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.




At school I have a (paper) file with some other similar services to TubeChop - when I have a chance to retrieve I will share the names of those sites.

One problem with TubeChop - I have been unable to find a way to embed edited videos directly into a power point presentation.  You can do this with a full-length YouTube video, either using a somewhat complicated process, or by installing an add-on called i-Spring Free.  The latter makes it quite easy to insert videos in a slide - which allows for smoother playback (if you are using power point already) and eliminates the potentially distracting comments and "related" videos that appear alongside a video on the main YouTube site.

Thing 4: Cloud storage

I have been using DropBox for several years now.  The primary reason that I started the account was not for backup or accessibility of files (which seem to be the primary reasons that people use systems like Dropbox) but for file sharing.  I use rather large power-point files for class, especially for my AP Environmental Science students.  These files include a lot of information that is not found in the textbook, or is organized in a different way, so I wanted to provide access to the presentations for the students.  The problem is that the school website has a size limit on files that we can upload, and these presentations far exceed the limit.  Dropbox has a feature that allows uploaded files to be shared with other web users, so I add a link to these files from the test review section of my school web page (see here for my class APES page, which has links to multiple files shared on Dropbox, or here is a direct link to a presentation on Geology).

An alternative that I discovered recently is Google Drive.  Actually I have also been using this platform to share files for a few years too, for a church group and for the Cross Country team.  But I realized recently that if you install Google Drive on your computer, you can automatically sync/back up 15 GB of space for free.  This is not enough if you have a lot of photos to back up (that's where Flickr or other services come in) but would be a good option for lesson plans, student handouts, etc that one might work on at home and at school.

Sarah noted that Dropbox does not seem to work properly when installed on school computers.  I noticed the same thing, but since I am primarily using it for file sharing that did not really matter.  You can log in to your dropbox account and upload files using a web interface instead of dragging them into a folder on your computer  I am not sure if Google Drive will present similar problems on the school computers - I have not tried it yet.  But it is working fine from my home computer, where I have 1.9GB uploaded an synced.  Below is a screen shot of what the interface looks like.

Photo sharing (Thing 2)

I have been using photo sharing sites for my AP Environmental Science field trips for a number of years.  For a variety of reasons I have not always used the same site for storing photos, so they are in a couple of places.  Most of the photos from the last few years are on Google Plus (which was originally configured as PicasaWeb from Google).  Here are the photos from this year and sets from the past few years.  I also have a few photos on Flickr, such as these from a Fall 2009 field trip.  A few of my photo sets also contain images I took on my travels and have subsequently used to create Google Earth tours.  Photos included in Google Earth tours need to exist elsewhere on the web (they are not part of the GE file), so uploading them to a photo-sharing/storing site is a good way to include personal photos in such a project.

For the past few years my APES students have been documenting natural change at a "field site" near their home - a back yard, local park, etc.  They are strongly encouraged to include photos with the journals they keep for this project.  I could have them share/submit photos to a shared Flickr or other site.

Most of my field trip photos are available only to those with a link, though I have not always been consistent about how they are uploaded.

If anyone else reads this, I am curious to know about other suggestions you might have for shared/student contributed photos.

Google Earth

I have been using Google Earth in my AP Environmental Science and my biology classes for several years now.  This software is a great way to display geographically-based data, images, and other information.  For example, I created a "tour" of natural resource and conservation issues affecting the Everglades ecosystem.  A snapshot is seen below.  Click here for the complete file (opens in Google Earth).

When viewing files in Google Earth, you can zoom in and out to get detailed or panoramic views of the landscape.  You can also click on placemarkers, like the green tree icons in this screenshot, to get more information about a particular location.

When you click on an icon, a box pops up with more information.  See below for an example - this gives information about the wetland habitats of the Everglades, as well as providing images and text.  You can also embed Youtube clips into these boxes.  

My AP Environmental Science students have created final class projects using Google Earth for the past three years.  The students have displayed quite a bit of creativity in generating their projects.  

You can also convert Google Earth files to Google map versions that can be embedded into a web page.  As an example, this is my field trip page, which provides links to data and information on the field studies my AP classes have conducted over the years.  (The map needs to be updated, though current data is available here)

I can see Google Earth as a useful tool for teacher presentations or student projects in subjects such as history and foreign language/culture in addition to the earth and biological sciences.  Perhaps you can think of other uses too!?

Here one more screen shot from the Everlgades tour, depicting an embedded Youtube video.  You can also download Google Earth free and view tutorials.  There are some basic instructions in my student project page too.