Week 3: Images and Digital Storytelling

After reading the different descriptions of the various image or photo sharing websites, I decided to try Photobucket to create a very simple slideshow. I found pictures of the four phases of mitosis on the website Basic Biology Slides for Modesto Junior College. http://virtual.yosemite.cc.ca.us/randerson/Lynn's%20Bioslides/bioslide.htm

I created a Photobucket account and loaded the pictures into an album at Photobucket. I created the four picture slide show and added titles. I had comments on the bottom to describe the steps, but they didn't show up on the slideshow. I would have to play with the different options to try to get the comments to appear. I added a rounded corner border to make it look like you are seeing the slides under a microscope.


I can see using the slide show feature for students to make a project using pictures from a lab or explaining a process like I did with mitosis.

Digital storytelling and Using Images Reflection

Digital storytelling uses videos, pictures, and creative to tell a story in a new and interesting way. A science teacher can use digital storytelling to hook students on a topic, teach a lesson, or review a lesson. The approach used by Common Craft with the "in Plain English" series is one example of digital storytelling that a teacher could follow and create a lesson. Watching the elementary students do their projects using the " in Plain English" method, shows how science topics can be presented in easy to understand format and in a way that everyone can produce a video. I like the idea of a short and to the point video that is based on context and not fancy editing or sophisticated equipment. This is something that most teachers can do and that students can do with very little guidance.

It was informative to read the copyright and fair use information. Multimedia presentations using original and copyrighted material can be used for student instruction for up to two years. The sources should be credited in the project including author, title, publisher and date. A notice can be added to the project stating that "materials included under fair use exemption of US copyright law and prepared according to multimedia fair use guidelines and restricted from further use." http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml

The Creative Commons site produces free licenses of your work that allows other to use, modify, or build on your creations. The site allows you to search for images that the creator is allowing others to use. You then can use these images in your multimedia project. It was an easy site to use and many images were available for the searches I tried. Here is a picture I found when searching cell organelles. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cell_parts.png

Chapter 2 on Digital Images and Video for Teaching Science from the textbook explains the benefit of using relevant images and videos to enhance a lesson. The images need to fit the content and instructional goals. The teacher should have a discussion with the class about the image and ask meaningful questions. The image or video should add to the teaching and not replace the teaching done by the teacher. The teacher should be careful of copyrighted images and video and show students how to use web content correctly.

I think images and videos are extremely useful to show experiments or events that are just not possible to do in a classroom.

This site was listed in the text and it shows microscope and photomicrograph pictures of many different things. http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/micro/gallery.html I searched the butterfly wing scale gallery and compared a blue morpho butterfly to a monarch butterfly.

I can see many uses for this site including using the DNA pictures, picture of cholesterol, process of mitosis, and nucleotide pictures. I would add them to my prepared lectures and presentations to enhance the lesson.

The textbook chapter also illustrated how data can be collected from a video of an experiment. I think this is a create interactive way to use a video.

I wanted to include a video that I had taken and include it in this post. I used my Nikon CoolPix camera to take this short video yesterday of my daughter. My husband created a water slide/slip and slide for my daughters.

I can see my students using digital cameras to take pictures of parts of an experiment as before and after pictures or a short video of part of the experiment.

Using pictures and videos in a lesson or project is an easy way to enhance student learning. Proper use of copyrighted images is important and needs to be taught to the students.

Science and Literacy

I find that my students often have a difficult time reading scientific materials, labs, and their textbook. Often their written lab reports, essay anwers, and special reports are often full of grammatical erros and are lacking good explanations. They comment that this is biology class and not english class, so they don't have to use all the skills that they have learned in other classes. I agree with the statement from the Science and Literacy Tools for Life article when it says " Your primary task as a sceince educator is to help students master science concepts and processes. Your secondary task is to help students improve their language skills within the context of science, because all teachers need to support literacy within the context of their discipline." I am always looking for ways to make by students better readers and writters.

The article expresses several ways to work on increasing literacy. Sharing performance expectations for students, using explicit teaching strategies, and metacognition. Letting my students know what I expect is a step that I always do with my students. I find that it is so important for them to know what to expect and for them to know what I expect from them. One area I could work on is different teaching strategies. The Write as You Read Science is one method and I would like to look for other strategies. I like to introduce my students to the key ideas and words before they read a passage, but I would like to try other ideas mentioned in the article. Writing narrative procedures and lab reports is one way I could add a metacognitive strategy to my labs. Doing a metacognive conversation to solve a problem is another strategy to increase metacognition .

In the Common Core Literacy Standards for Science, the integration of knowledge and Ideas standards is one that stands out for me. I thinking translating quanitiative or technical information in words into tables and charts is critical for science students. Comparing and contrasting information is another important skill that I work on with my students.

Using a Variety of Web Tools Week 2

After reading Science 2.0, I started looking at some of sources. I went to http://www.mywebspiration.com/ and created a concept map of the peripheral nervous system. I make a concept map like this with my students in the nervous system chapter on the whiteboard. This would allow me to show it in a presentation using a projector. The site was pretty simple to use and I can see me students being able to create their own concept map of our current topic.






http://www.mywebspiration.com/publish.php?i=469217a8646

I watched the TEDx talk from David Gallo-Underwater Astonishments. It was a very interesting vidoe showing how sea animals use camouflague. Finding a few talks that would fit with a few of my biology topics is something that I plan on doing for the school year.

Chapter 3 in the Technology in the Secondary Science Classroom discusses simulations and list several sites. I tried http://www.explorelearning.com/. The mice breeding for genetics was a good simulations that quickly shows the results of crosses including percentages. It allows the user to pick which mice to breed. The transcription and translation simulation used base pairing and codons to show the two processes. I have used a similar site in the past to show these two processes. The site was interesting, but there is a fee after the free 30 day trial. Another simulation was Atom Builder at www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/atom/# The simulation allowed the user to create an atom. I would have to play around with this one more to see how it would be used in a chemistry class. Questions would need to be created to go with this simulation.


Screencasting was another tool that I tried this week. I used Jing to capture a picture and video on the screen. I was told at #scichat last night that screentoaster is another good one to use.
Here is a photosynthesis picture that I captured using Jing. I could use a screencast to add a video or picture to a presentation, blog, or an email.
http://www.screencast.com/t/MWQ0ODg3M. I did have a problem when I tried to use the code to embed the picture into this blog. Only a few characters copied and the picture would not appear. I plan on trying another screencasting site.

It definetly takes some practice to use these different sites and discover ways to use them in class.

Using Glogster

There are so many interesting web tools to look at and figure out how to use. I decided to try Glogster, a poster making tool, since I have my biology classes make a biome poster as one part of biome project. I thought this might be a different way for some of the students to make a poster, since many students would prefer using a computer to markers and glue.

I found it pretty easy to use and I made a very basic poster on a rainforest including a video, moving graphics, text, and images. This is a tool that my students could quickly learn how to use and produce a very informative poster.




Embedding the Glog was easy to do. After creating the Glog there was an option to copy the code and then I just pasted it into the blog.

Guiding Principles For Technology For a High School Classroom

These are the principles that I think are important for using technology in a high school classroom.

1. Using technology to enhance content learning for students.
2.Using technology to enhance content learning for the teacher.
3.Using websites that engage students in learning and not just to play games.
4.Having students use technology that they already know how to use and have an interest in (cell phones, texting, blogging, social networking, digital cameras)
5.To show experiments or procedures that would not be possible in a high school classroom.
6.Allow students to collect data and do research for inquiry based experiments.
7.Teach students how to find relevant sites, monitor students use of the technology, and provide feedback on better ways to use the technology

Websites I have used as part of an internet activities in biology that help to show cellular processes and genetic ideas that are difficult to understand by just reading about them in a textbook.

Genetics Tour: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/tour/
Mitosis: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/baby/divide.html#
Kreb cycle: http://www.science.smith.edu/departments/Biology/Bio231/krebs.html

Setting the Stage Reflection

The explosion of recent technologies has been incredible and it is hard to image what the next ten to twenty years will bring. I remember trying the internet and email for the first time in college and how exciting it was to use. Now, sending an email is so routine and doing a quick Google search on any topic is the first thing we think to do. How we use the technology in our classrooms, how we prepare our students to use the technologies, and ways to incorporate important workplace skills are critical to our students’ success.

I was not aware of the name Web 2.0, but I have been using some of the newer interactive sites like Facebook. I have used interactive websites on photosynthesis on a SMART board with my biology classes.

The world is getting smaller and flatter as discussed in the “It’s a Flat World After All”. Our students need the required skills to succeed in the workplace in order to compete with countries like India and China. The quote “Girls finish your homework – people in China and India are starving for your job”, by Thomas Friedman is an interesting way to state how our students need to have the skills to be competitive for jobs here in the United States with people from around the world. While staying at a small bed and breakfast during our visit to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver this February, we met a couple from Finland. During a conversation at breakfast, the couple we were traveling with discovered that the man from Finland had visited a very small town in Michigan where they had family. They even knew a few of the same people from the town. The world is truly getting smaller as we continue to travel and connect using technology.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills and the New Challenge for Science Education articles discuss the important skills our students need for their future. Science classes are one of the areas that can introduce, teach, and reinforce these skills by using scientific investigations and inquiry based labs. Non-routine problem solving and systems thinking are two skills that are difficult for students if they are used to cookbook style labs. I have been adding new inquiry labs to my biology classes to help students become better problem solvers and thinkers. The students can be resistant to these changes when they are used to being spoon feed the information and wanting to know the one correct answer. Students need to be successful in partial inquiry labs and work up to more involved inquiry labs to help them make the change in thinking. A good inquiry lab using partners or a small group can help the students use and learn the needed skills of communication, self-management, critical thinking, creativity, collaborative skills, accountability, and self direction.

Technology in the classroom has great potential if it can be used to improve student learning in the content area in a way that a textbook or lecture would not be able to do. Giving a laptop to every student in the school doesn’t mean that the students will learn more if the teachers are not using the technology in new and innovative ways to increase the student learning. Using technology to help student do inquiry scientific investigations, collect data, or communicate with others to express their discoveries are ways that will help students build the skills they need for the future. Most students can easily use technology from their cell phones, MP3 players, and computers, and visit social networking sites, so we need to use that interest to help them learn the content in a way that will want to learn, think, and discover.

I am hoping to learn from this class ways to use technology in my classes in new and innovative ways that will help my students build the skills needed for them to succeed. I want to use the technology to enhance my student’s learning and to create interest in the content and not just to use it for the sake of using the computer or website when a lecture using a whiteboard would do the same thing.

My Introduction

I am Joy Mayer, a high school teacher in Green Bay,WI at Notre Dame Academy. I have taught biology and chemistry classes for the past 12 years. I am taking Web Tools and Anatomy and Physiology this summer. These are my first on-line classes and first classes through Montana State University. I am considering the program to get my master's degree.

I have a website through my school web page and have used websites and PowerPoint presentations in my classes. My classes have done some website assignments using sites on DNA and mitosis. I am interested in adding new web tools to my lessons for next year.

I am new to blogging and Twitter. I have been using Facebook to keep up with friends.

My husband, two daughters (ages 2 and 5), and I enjoy camping and hiking. I like to cook, scrapbook, read, travel, and downhill ski. It is great to have summers off to spend with my girls and to travel.