Brief Updates

Two interesting articles came out of eSchool News this week. The first deals with the increasing attention being paid to Green Schools. It's a lengthy article with good examples and tips. The other deals with an attempt to develop more educational video games. It was interesting to see that Global Kids, an online student group (k-12) that was early adopters to the Second Life: Teen Life platform, had helped create one dealing with life in Hiati.

A Quantum Shift

One of the things that we like about inquiry projects is that it allows students to exert more control over the learning process. When proper amounts of time and guidance are provided, students can pause and reflect on what they have learned, what is relevant to the task at hand, and how best to demonstrate their new-found knowledge. Recently, we have come across to parallel approaches that teachers and students might find rewarding. The first came from documentary film-maker Nikos Theodosakis. The Kelowna-based Theodosakis has been offering workshops to teachers and students on the art of documentary film-making, taking the aspiring film-makers through the process of brainstorming and pitching an idea, to gathering and editing the film. For Theodosakis, the reflection that occurs is as important as the finished film itself, and to us, this process mirrors the same one we would love to see happen in science class - students brainstorm and pitch the investigation, research, experiment, and then present their data. Reflecting on the meaning and relevance of the acquried data/film is just as important as the gathering of the information itself.

Putting this process into a wider context is a recent contest launched by online video provider Quantum Shift TV, entitled "Be the Change! Share the Story". Quantum Shift Tv is loosely based around the YouTube format of social networking for video, but concentrates on "the cultural values of community, care, and interconnectedness" offered by citizen journalism. The school contest focuses on documenting a social or environmental project undertaken by the school. Not only does the project hope to encourage students to commit to some form of local action, but contest videos are then uploaded to the Quantum Shift Tv website, where they can be viewed, ranked, commented on, and linked to, by other contest participants in an effort to create a community geared around social and environmental awareness.

Green Schools

Sometime ago we waxed rhapsodic about our desire to see more green buildings in Calgary, particularly those that took advantage of schools as potential green (education) sites. A few weeks ago, we were lucky enough to be invited to Cochrane High School to observe some of the of green steps they have taken over the last few years.

Above is the first solar panel array that the school fund-raised for. The panels have been placed on the roof, and it was mentioned that the biggest limit to the number of panels they could place was not cost, but the quality of the roof.

These kinds of roofs were not built to handle large structural loads, and the placing of solar panels, wind turbines, or event "greening" of the roof, will require renovations be made.

Below is the second array the school purchased the following year (at a much lower cost), along with a small wind turbine.

Does Cochrane High School generate enough power for its own electrical needs? No. Currently the power is sufficient for their large gymnasium scoreboard, a laptop that hosts their website and monitors their power consumption (running continuously), with perhaps a small surplus. The real payoff then is in the interest the school has sparked not just among Cochrane students, but throughout the world, as their website will attest. As more and more schools are being constructed with LEEDS and BOMA standards in mind for greening, Cochrane High functions as a first-generation pioneer in this effort.

Science Conference Reflections

Not exactly a by-the-moment account of last month's Science Teachers' Conference in Edmonton, but the passing of time as allowed for some reflection. The last few posts here at Exploding Beakers has seen us reflect on the change in school cultures - not the plural there as there is a teacher culture and a student culture. We've spent a little bit of bandwidth discussing the disjunction between these two groups. Students, as many commentators, such as Marc Prensky have noted, are moving quickly into an interactive, online culture from a highly stimulating, yet ultimately passive, visual culture (television). Teachers unfortunately, are still straddling the divide between the former knowledge-as-scarce print culture, and a visual one that features knowledge-as-content. Most teachers, especially those featured as regional winners in the Iron Science Competition, are well-attuned to the needs of knowledge-as-content (visual) learners, as were many of the presenters at the Science Teachers' Conference. Unfortunately, these types of learners are a shrinking group, and unfortunately, conference presenters did little to discuss how teachers could better serve the digital demographic.

That learning requires context, is nothing new. In a classroom dominated by a visual culture, knowledge comes as facts embedded within entertaining situations (shows, skits, products), but in the online, interactive, digital environment, where knowledge facts can be recalled artificially on demand, the learning context needs to be an active one with a focus on the application and evaluation of knowledge. Have I recalled the appropriate knowledge? How can I best use this knowledge to complete this task? This is perhaps a difficult conceptual shift to make, but Exploding Beakers is willing to step up and help teachers make it. We will be conference co-organizers for the Calgary 2008 Science Teachers' Conference.

On a more positive note, our favourite conference session came from the teachers at Rundle College, a school for students with learning disabilities, who provided examples and advice on differentiated instruction and assessment in a science classroom. Their assessments were novel in that they respected the learning-style of students, kinestheic learners were encouraged to express their knowledge through physical movement, etc. Was this a perfect for traditional pen and paper midterms and finals? No, as the teachers admitted, it was too early to tell, and definately required far more time management skills. However, student results, as well as confidence and comfort, were quite positive, and the teachers were looking to continue refining their technique.

National Iron Science Teacher Competition (Nov.22)

The crowd started assembling early here at the staging ground for the National Iron Science Teacher competitive. Exploding Beakers had arrived with the morning light to find a group of volunteer and competitors going through last minute preparations for the annual competition as hundreds of science student all eager to cheer on the best, and most innovative Science teachers across Canada.

At exactly 10:00, the auditorium lights dimmed, the music got noticably louder, as lights the overhead exploded in colored lights and sporks. From a cloud of dry ice, as the Discover Channel hosts emerged to kick short the festivities.


Culled from four regional competitions, the teams from Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and the ultimate winners, Unintelligent Design from Manitoba. Highly entertaining, each team provided twelve minute lessons around the theme of "The Body", that could perhaps be said to represent the ideal in a visually-oriented (raised on TV) culture. Many of the teams were able to pack much information into their skits, with one team even adding details about mechanics and levers in their presentation on digestion.



The one thing we would have liked to have seen more of though, was more interaction with the audience along inquiry lines. While most groups organized thier skit around the presentation of a problem, none managed it as a problem to be solved, with the development of a set of criteria for a possible solution, gathering evidence throughout their lesson to be compared against that criteria for evaluation. Only the team from Alberta, with their CSI-inspired presentation came close.



In other related news, Larissa Drozda, from St. Margaret School, was revealed as the Western Canadian winner of the My Science Teacher competition, an online student contest run in conjunction with the Iron Science Teacher festivities.