The Educators’ Spin On It: 100 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day Every Day with Kids

The Educators’ Spin On It: 100 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day Every Day with Kids. Some really neat ideas for Earth Day on April 22nd. We are celebrating on April 21st at Cardinal Gibbons. Have a food truck, ice cream truck, animals and other presentations going on.

FTC Qualifier 2015

It’s the start of a whole new season with the robotics club. They have their first “official” competition tomorrow. Cardinal Gibbons again will host a Qualifying tournament for First Robotics. Set for Saturday January 17th from 7 am – 5:30 pm, 19 teams have been confirmed. We are lucky to be able to broadcast the event live on the Cardinal Gibbons High School Cube Channel (now called the cube).

Details of the event are located at our school website and the robotics page

Tournament Map

Pictures will be posted in the future about the event. Hosting an event can be difficult but a rewarding experience for your school community. I found that out last year and again this year.

Speaking Robotics this contest looks pretty cool; Zero Robotics.  As I’m writing this they are broadcasting the finals live. There’s a High School category. I’m wondering if any of our students would be interested. I might just bring this up to our Robotics Coach. But after this weekend. The contest is run by the CASIS Academy which a friend of mine belongs to. She posted this the other day and then on twitter I saw the live feed. Its a competition that lasts from September to December. Here is the description on the website:

The participants compete to win a technically challenging game by programming their strategies into the SPHERES satellites. The game is motivated by a current problem of interest to DARPA, NASA and MIT.  Student software controls satellite speed, rotation, direction of travel, etc.  Depending on the game premise, the students must program their satellites to complete game objectives (navigate obstacles, pick up virtual objects, etc.) while conserving resources (fuel, charge, etc.) and staying within specified time and code-size limits.  The programs are “autonomous” – that is, the students cannot control the satellites during the test itself.  (Zero Robotics Website)

Until my next post.. Tournament Results.. Hope everyone had a good start to the New Year.

 

Lasers and Mirrors – YouTube

Lasers and Mirrors – YouTube. Great video of mirrors and properties. Check it out, it was done for a physics student.

It comes to an End..this year anyway.

Second full day of competition brought some more ups and downs. I would have to say more ups’ until the end of the day.  The day started early again and we had the 3rd match of the day.  The team needed to come through with a win and show  how their robot could perform well in competition. The competition was rocking as they say. FRC which was in the other half the building was starting their competition also and having opening ceremonies.

        

Before the beginning of the competitions that day Dean Kamen spoke to everyone . His passion for STEM and helping young people was evident in his speech. On the First Challenge website  it says “his passion and determination to help young people discover the excitement and rewards of science and technology are the cornerstones of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).”

Once opening ceremonies were finished, competition began. The day went well for Gibbons Robotics, we won both matches. After the matches were complete the alliances would be chosen. The top teams would choose other teams to partner with during the last part of the competition. We were hoping to be chosen since we did well in the last part of the competition. Also, again personal opinion, we had one of the best defensive robots and it had looked promising. But it didn’t work out, we were not picked for alliance. The awards took place at the end. The team had been hoping to get the PTC design award again, this would then qualify us for World. But it didn’t work out that way.

We went 3-3 at the competition and the team did a good job. They shouldn’t hang their heads. It was a tough run, only 8 days to prepare. They didn’t even have an opportunity to shake the bot down and make sure everything was working before competition. Also half the team wasn’t there due to different reasons. They did get in the news, there is an article that highlights the team. It does a good job talking about the patent the team has on its hardware.

Everything went well and the team was a bit down about not making the World competition, but they did a good job for such a short turn around. They should be proud of themselves, the coaches and mentor’s are. Which reminds me a big shout out to Mr. and Mrs. Toebes for their time and thank you to all the parents for their support. They’re already talking about getting started for next year.

Robotics Tournament

Finished! And it was a great success. According to everyone who participated in the event. We had over 500 live views on our broadcast at High School Cube. It was the second most watched event at Cardinal Gibbons since we started broadcasting live. Over 300 people attended the event. A special shout out to all the volunteers who worked. We were lucky in that we had a number of volunteers from Cisco. We also had teacher, parent and student volunteers working throughout the day. To read a brief summary of the event you can see an article written by our development person (thanks Rachelle) on our school web page. You can also find the rules to the qualifying matches. The event was called FTC Block Party game.  First Tech Challenge of NC helped with various areas of the tournament. Their support throughout the tournament was appreciated. Various other people like our Principal Mr. Curtis and Assistant Principal Mr. C both supported and helped with the event. Their support was greatly appreciated during the planning and executing phase of the tournament.

            

 

More photos are available at our school smugmug page. The purpose of the blog entry is not to go over the whole event; you can read about that on the school web page. It’s about sharing pointers to someone who might be planning on holding a robotics tournament.

First I would recommend you have a meeting with your administrators to make sure you have the materials, facilities, and support. I had tons of meetings with my administrators and maintenance to make sure we had what we needed. When we didn’t,  we had to go outside the school for it. We were lucky because our Coaches were amazing and made sure whatever we didn’t have at school we brought in.

Second make sure you have your community involved. We had over 25 Parent volunteers and 30 student volunteers. All of them helped to make event go as smooth as possible. If I had a shortage of people for somewhere, there was a volunteer waiting to fill in. We also had the support of the science department. Even though we had just put on our Science Festival about a week or two before, the science teachers agreed to volunteer and help with tournament. Our judges and referees came from Cisco. Again volunteers. NC First did provide a couple of volunteers to help out. Overall this was the most important component of this event. If you don’t have the volunteers to run the event, well then your in trouble.

Third, make sure you schedule it on the calendar way before anything else. If I had to go back I wouldn’t have the science festival and tournament so close. But that was nobody’s fault it just happened that way. Also, food, we had our concession stand open all day. I really think we only needed it open right before lunch and maybe a couple hours after lunch. Usually teams will bring their own snacks. In the cafeteria we had the ability to assign one table for each team. We hoped this would keep the food out of our classrooms. It did. I might add that the teams did an awesome job in cleaning up and keeping everything clean.

Last, use Google Docs to help you organize the event. I can’t tell you how awesome the forms and spreadsheets were for organizing volunteers. I created a form for the event with two hour time slots for different volunteer spots. It worked great, I could share the documents with the organizing committee and change times or add times when needed on the fly. I really do like Google Docs, and now that our school has set up an account with them its becoming easier to use. One thing, advice keep a watch on your time slots so you can close them when filled. I had too many people at a certain time and then no volunteers at another time. I wonder if there is a script you can use in Google? Not sure, but there are tons of templates in Google you can use.

I hope I helped anyone who is organizing an event like a robotics competition or science event.  I really was on the side of organization, the Coaches took care of the technical side. I did enjoy watching the matches and our team Purple Gears 2901 did well and earned the PTC Design Award. Again a big thanks to our volunteers, NC First Tech Challenge and Cisco.

Science Festival Done!

It’s finally finished. We hosted our first Science Festival at school. It didn’t go too bad. Didn’t have the crowd we expected but our students who attended had a blast. We held it on a Monday night from 5-8 pm. The night started out with our guest speaker Dr. Mary Jane Epps, who works at the Dunn Lab at NC State University. She did a great job and we are actually thinking about bringing her back to talk to our students after school one day.  Attendees had a couple of options; they could listen to Dr. Epps speak, visit the new  Robotics team“maker room” , visit our Science Olympiad team, participate in one of the STEM activities in a the science rooms, or star watch on the piazza.  I’m not sure I can do the night justice, but if you want to see how it went check out Rachelle Garbarine’s story on the front page of Gibbons  website. 

In my room everyone played the Mar’s Rover Game on Xbox 360. The kids had a blast and my students who were helping wanted me to bring it to class one day. Might be a good treat for them, we are in astronomy right now. Students also helped the younger children build air rockets. A distance competition was held and winners received prizes. I found this activity on a NASA education website.  We also had our students working with our new Lego kits. This was possible because of the NASA grant we received and also the Siemens grant I obtained over the summer. Students worked to build and complete the Green City Challenge. Side note we purchased the Space Challenge from Lego Education also, this works with the EV3’s. At our Robotics Regional Tournament set for January 25th, my students will be mentoring the younger visitors on the Green Challenge activity.  Another blog entry to come.

I will mention one highlight of the night, our Science Department Chair, Sr. Janet Schemmel SND, dropped different objects into liquid nitrogen, freezing them in an instant, then breaking them.  Thanks to Dan Porter for obtaining the liquid. Not only did she have a blast but also everyone who attended her demonstration.

      

The whole night would not have been possible without everyone in the department being on board. If you are going to do this, and I mentioned this in another entry, make sure you have people to help. It took a good deal of planning to do this, and with the help of others we got it done. I did get others in the school involved, great opportunity for collaboration, for instance our Marketing club helped create the flyers for the event and our Tech theater students helped with setup. One other thing make sure you have a budget, you will have expenses and don’t want to have to use your class budget. Applying for a grant might be a good idea, science festival + community, I think you could find funding immediately.

Even though we didn’t have the attendance we would have liked; it was a great success. Or so people are telling me. It also was a great start to establishing our relations with our community.  We are already talking about what we should do next year. Next department meeting should be interesting.  My goal when proposing the festival was to spur some interest in STEM and establish a future event for us to host.  And I think we did.

By the way this #3 of the #bc20 challenge. The first three I had included in one entry. But I’m going to change that. I think I might have been cheating a bit.

BC # 4 …CGHS Science Festival

So I promised in one of my other blog entries that I would talk about our upcoming science festival. A 3 hour night that everyone in the Science department is taking part in. The idea came to me about a year ago and I proposed it to our department. I had read about other schools holding a STEM event for their community and thought this might be something good for our community. Well guess what? It worked and now we are hosting our first science festival at Cardinal Gibbons High School. 

 

Getting everyone on board was easy, communication was the hardest part. Getting the word out to middles schools and middle school teachers was a hard job. I think this year we are just relying on word of mouth and then next year we hope to expand our communication.  So I would advise anyone who is going to do this make sure you establish a line of communication with your middle school teachers.  We hope to have a signup for future notifications at the event.

Our second hurdle was when to hold it. January seemed the best with all the other events occurring at school. So we decided on January 13th a Monday.  Now we needed to decide on a time. Hoping to draw more people we scheduled the event from 5-8 pm.  What impressed me the most was the support of my administration and colleagues. Very important if you are to succeed in doing this type of planning.

I can’t thank my colleagues for coming through with some awesome STEM activities.  See the schedule below. Plus visitors will be able to meet our Science Olympiad and Robotics teams.

“Belly Button Biodiversity” presentation by NC State graduate students — Main Theater from 5:30 – 6:15 pm and again from 6:30 – 7:15 pm

Belly buttons fascinate us all.  Ever wonder what microbes may be living inside your belly button?  The Belly Button Biodiversity Project is currently researching this unique biome.   Come and learn more about how this collection of organisms on our skin forms our first line of defense against pathogens.

Stargazing on the Piazza

Have you always wanted to gaze into the night sky through a telescope?  Maybe you really are an astronomer at heart.   What is special about the night sky on January 13, 2014?  Stop by and bring your eye up to the lens to view our solar system and beyond.

Science Olympiad – Auxiliary Gym

Introduce yourself to our medal winning Science Olympiad team and see how they are preparing for their upcoming regional competition – from elastic launched gliders to bottle rockets to boomilevers to forensic science to Duck® tape structures to …

ROBOTICS – room 120

Come and meet the Gibbons Robotics team — the Purple Gears, and see their latest robotic designs perform specific tasks as they ready for the upcoming FIRST Tech Challenge.  In the past five years the team has developed novel solutions to earn one published patent application and two pending submissions.     

The Strawberry Genome Project – rooms 219 and 221

All living things, including the food you eat, have DNA – the genetic code.  In this 20 minute laboratory experience you will extract visible DNA strands from the cells of a strawberry and find out what it means to be OCTOPLOID!  Delicious!

Olympic Broomball – room 223

It may not be ice hockey or officially the sport of curling, but you can challenge yourself employing the laws of physics, and record the fastest time by chasing a bowling bowl along a bordered course with only a broom!

NASA – A STEM Activity Area – room 225

What’s the buzz about STEM?  Find out why you have the “right stuff” to be an engineer, a scientist, or mathematician in the 21^st century.  Engage yourself in a variety of STEM activities from rockets to rovers.  You can even try landing the Mars rover, “Curiosity” using Xbox.  Innovators unite!

Dazzling Demos in Chemistry – rooms 227 and 228

• See the Miracle – turn water into wine!!
• Get excited by watching “excited electrons” produce light.  Chemiluminescence – is this what happens in a firefly?
• Old Faithful has nothing on Old Foamey – come check it out!
• Shake it Up!!  Come and jiggle the flask and make it turn the colors of a stoplight!

Who knows what else?  Chemistry holds “the element” of surprise!

The Unnoticed World – room 229

Come and meet – up close and personal, some of the most common insects and discover nature’s remarkable beauty. Visitors participate in caterpillar and termite races and win a prize

Concessions – CGHS Café

Fuel your science brain and give it a rest with a snack or two from the concessions.

check the website for a map

I have to thank Joleen Smith for this wonderful write up she is amazing when it comes to this type of job. There are a lot people working on this event, and that is what you need when doing something like this. It can get overwhelming if you don’t have the help you need. Now we wait and see, if 20 people show up I think it’s a success because it’s a start. Once we get our foundation we can build on it next year. I do have to mention here that the parents have been awesome. They have given us a great deal of support and are volunteering to help in any way possible. A special thanks  to them.  Also a special thanks to all my colleagues taking the time out of their to schedule to do this event.

Two Full weeks in the Bag… NASA Grant

Title says it all, we finally finished two full weeks. And wow, it has been flying by. Every time I look up at the clock at school, the day is almost over and I can never cover everything I want to cover. Oh well!

Let’s see where should I start first…Oh well we had our dedication and my creative video crew did an awesome job covering the Mass. They also did a great job interviewing the Bishop, you can see the interview on Youtube.  After dedication we then had parent/teacher night. The next day we were at the Friday Institute on NC State Campus doing a professional development. Yep I think it was a busy end of the August.

September came like a flash, I’m still trying to figure out where it all went. A couple of things that have happened, number one on the list is we received a mini grant from NES (NASA explorers school). Totally unexpected didn’t think it would happen. We applied knowing that eventually the cuts were coming and there would be no money left. (Which might still happen with gov’t shut down).  Hopefully, I say this because of the gov’t situation right now, we will be able to get our EV3’s and other Lego equipment. This year we have a room dedicated to Robotics and Science Olympiad. Its pretty awesome and at some point I will post pictures. In the room I’m hoping to have the Lego’s set up so they can be used during lunch periods etc.. With the purchase we are hoping to build an outreach with middle school children. We are incorporating the Green City sets into our Earth Day/Sustainability Day celebration and our Science Festival in January ( more on that in a later blog entry). Can’t wait to start getting this going and begin our little outreach endeavor.

I have pretty much decided to flip all of my Forensic class. It allows me to cover more material in class by doing different activities. The students are loving it. They said they like that class is made up of doing various activities and less lecture. They did however ask me to to make sure that there were worksheets to go along with the vodcasts.  And students haven’t been doing to bad on their assessments. Cool internet tool to use in Forensics is the CSI Web Adventure, it shows a variety of instruments used in the lab to analyze evidence. I gave students a work sheet that I created for the website and they dived into investigating the website.

I’ve been doing a good deal of whiteboarding in class and it has been successful. I still have to get it to a point that students are participating and getting something out of it.  I started using an exit tool, like a parking garage. Students posted their questions on post its and then posted them on poster paper. I had students do this just before the test, and went over all their questions at the beginning of class. Scores were pretty good, some did really well while others need improvement. I’m going to do this again but try a different format, maybe Padlet.

Another idea for class, is doing the Earth Science Week Photograph contest.  Still working on how I’m going to implement this. Meanwhile, this week is spirit week so we decided to do a scavenger hunt at school on Friday. We hope to have Physics and Earth Science students working together to find solutions to questions using GPS. Should be fun!

Hopefully, I have caught up on some of the happenings around my class. I haven’t done a parent newsletter in a while but hopefully that will come. Look for futures blogs on the Literacy Project, Science Festival and other happenings.

Here we go….

Well two weeks to go and another year begins at my school. Changes have occurred throughout the school. Not bad changes. Just new changes. Mostly building changes which I know I’m excited about. New science rooms, office, lobby and media room. Yep definitely exciting this year.

               

Other then the changes in the building we have new faculty and technology this year. Again really exciting.  With cuts across the board in education we are very lucky to have had this plan approved early on. I think this really is the result of our principal and his hard work. Others also played a role in the project, but he was non stop with getting funding and the plans implemented.  Our vice principal and facilities/accountant person were really the ones getting all of this done on time.

So with all this new stuff I now have to think about all the things I learned during the summer experiences. I’m finally getting a chance to digest everything I did this summer. What I have brought back from all my experiences has been an asset to my classroom. Now its looking at how to implement this in the classroom.  I’ve already know that my experience with 2013 Siemens STARs research will fit perfectly in my geology section of class. I’m in the process of putting together a presentation using the pictures and research I did this summer. (see other posts for information) Using research information I can integrate everything into the  geological history and rock cycle sections.  Some of the websites we used during our research were excellent resources for geological history. If you are interested here is a google document with the websites. 

The other experiences will be great for electromagnetic spectrum and meteorology. Where we were at Langley we got a chance to talk to people about lasers and how they were used on satellites. In my other posts you can find all the resources I gained from this experience.  Last experience, Advanced Space Academy for Educators, and this experience showed me how I can overcome my fears with the help of others( go Team Marshall). This will be more of a story to tell students and maybe have them write something about how they have overcame some form of obstacle.

I’ve already decided to start class this year a little different, I ‘m going to continue to use the team building activities I did last year. Because as I found out this summer on all my experiences, collaboration and communication play a major role in real life STEM jobs. So I think this is important for the beginning of school. Plus this is when I put everyone into their groups, randomly.  But after this I’m going to have students do a project on the literacy principles.  Groups will be given two principles in one of the literacy components. I’m hoping to have enough groups to do all the principles so no one group is doing the same.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m going to allow my students to choose how they want to present the information. I’ll give them some basics to guide them at the beginning but I want them to pretty much figure it out for themselves and be creative.  I’ll also suggest some tools such as Prezi, WeVideo,  etc.  I would use glogster but it costs money now. Actually I think students could use Microsoft publisher if need be, it would just be saved to a USB and not the cloud. I’ve found that they can pretty much create the similar presentations using word or publisher. I think you get the idea by now. Why am I doing this project is because at the NSTA I didn’t realize how important it is for our students to be aware of the different components of Earth Science and Earth Systems. I mean I knew but just didn’t know there were resources out there to help teach these topics. Plus it fits the Next Generation Standards.

I could go on with all the ideas I have for the beginning of school. But then this post would be a mile long. So I’m going to stop here and continue to discuss all the new classroom tools I obtained this summer in other posts. Since it is the beginning of school , I’m hoping to keep up with everything. So bear with me, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the experiences I had during the summer. I know my PLN really got a boost.

Discovery Spring VirtCon Live

Well Saturday (April 20th) was the VirtCon with Discovery. We hosted a F2F event our Cardinal Gibbons HS, we had a small crowd. But, great collaboration and sharing of resources occurred.

We started the day with a great talk by Suzie Boss “Connecting Classroom and Community with PBL”. Her talk included ideas from other teachers and herself on how to implement project based learning projects. The key to her discussion was the collaboration with the community. Real life challenges that students have to solve. She shared  resources to help teachers get started . If you missed her discussion, check it out at PBL and communities on Livestream. She also hosts a blog and already posted the resources; Reinventing Project-Based Learning. Her books are available at Amazon:

  

I would recommend this presentation to anyone interested in implementing a different type of PBL and community service at the same time.

The next session we watched at our F2F(Cardinal Gibbons High School)event was presented by Kathy Beck “Globalizing Gen Z through Social Media and…”. In this presentation Kathy presented resources for web 2.0 by Bloom’s web 2.o. While sharing the on line tool, she also shared the app that would complete the same task. The only problem I see, but for most it probably is not a problem, she only shared the ipad app. Otherwise the on line tools were well received by all our attendees. Actually we couldn’t keep up with all the great resources she gave us, some of us had to go back on the presentation. Some of them included video, comic strips and flip book tools. Her website is a great resource for ipad apps.  Kathy Beck had some really great teaching tools and I definitely got some awesome ideas for my classroom. I will have to revisit this presentation at some time.

 

The keynote session at noon was given by Michael Furdyk about “Imagining Future Friendly Schools”. He talks about engaging students across the globe with technology. He mentions Don Tapscott and his book “ Growing up digital”. Michael Furdyk began his presentation giving the background to the rise of his ideas for TakingITGlobal. He has a passion for helping young people get involved in solving some of the challenges they face around world. The growth to his idea is amazing. Problems faced by young people vary today. His examples included different  stories that are inspiring and helpful to create a sustainable and action project. Awesome foundation for young people to get help and information on how to address the different challenges. If you are interested in getting your students involved, this is the way to go. His stories and talk are inspirational. Check out the website for TIGed to see more information.

 

Afternoon sessions included a couple of really good presentations. We had some people go off on their own to watch the ones they wanted to watch. There was a whole strand for the techbooks, some included how to integrate the resource, others were just about the resource and what is available.  For anyone who is interested in going to e-books this might be of interest. History Techbook with Brad Fountain and Science Techbook with Michael Bryant.

     

Another session addressed ipads and apps used in the classroom. One of the other sessions addressed how a district is implementing a technology into their schools. Something our school is currently looking into. I think the afternoon were full of some awesome presentations and it was very hard to choose a specific one. But, that is what makes this so great you can revisit the presentations anytime. To find all the presentations you can go to Discovery’s livestream channel at http://new.livestream.com/DEN.

Last session was given by Jennifer Wagner; “Selling the 7 “C’s” of Connections”. Main topic “connecting with other teachers”.  Her discussion included collabarting and how important it is to work with other teachers to help you enhance your classroom. She had a really good discussion on sharing with others, curating and even addressed how sometimes we don’t share enough with other teachers. Creativity was her next topic, she presented resources for this “C”, one of them was Global Read Aloud. Ms. Wagner did a good job in presenting examples for each of her ideas (“C’s”). I think the the DEN Favorite Places is a great idea. Everyone who attended was very interested in this idea.  Again I will have to revisit this presentation. Her collaborating, curating , creativity and other C’s were great issues to talk about with teachers.  This was a great PD talk.

Wow what a day tons of information to process. Didn’t even get to go to all the presentations. Recommendation; go to the Virtcon Live website and find the presentations and watch them. Great information available to all teachers.