HealthMap, dubbed as the ‘global disease alert map’, links news regarding disease outbreaks from around the world into a searchable Google Map interface. The service recently detected the salmonella outbreak in the U.S., which had sickened over 1,000 people, long before the Centre for Disease Control announced that it was happening.

HealthMap integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert.’(HealthMap)

The amount of ‘real-world’ data currently available on the Internet, wrapped in easy to access user friendly interfaces, is creating a boon for science teachers looking to inject greater degrees of relevance into their classrooms.

I do love the Google Earth product, as seen by at previous post where I share a method to help students visualize the vast size and distances that exist in our solar system. TechCrunch has written today about the increasing number of scientists who are using Google Earth to visualize their information. I find Google earth fantastic for this, as it lets you take data that may appear to only have one set of connections, but by mapping it geographically other trends appear. The example they share is the migration of animals. This could be displayed to students via a data projector, but I think a more useful exercise would be to let them explore the data within the confines of a structured assignment (to start) and then let them search for their own connections. I don’t know what that assignment would look like right now, but when I figure it out I will be sure to share it here.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Ever since I made the move to Mac I’ve been a heavy user of Keynote. I found it more elegant than PowerPoint (2004), it produced better looking images (the text just looked crisper) and it was dead easy to use. That was until recently.

Since making the move to Keynote I had never needed to create a presentation heavy in chemical and mathematical equations, and when I did I tended to already have what I needed in a PowerPoint slide. Now that I’ve been creating new content for my year 11 and 12 chemistry classes I’ve gone looking for the equation option in Keynote, and you know what? It’s not there. There is no equation editor in Keynote and that is a deal breaker for me.

A bout of Internet research revealed solutions, but none of them are very elegant, as they all result in a non-editable equation in my slide, plus they add about three steps to the process. If I want to make a change I have to go elsewhere, recreate the equation, then paste it back into the slide. I don’t feel the equations I currently write are complex enough to justify the added software and steps. Facing this situation I took at a look at PowerPoint 2008. I’d seen a few presentations done with the newest Windows version and was impressed by the quality of the text rendering. The fact that PowerPoint has an equation editor, combined with the fact that none of the major online presentation sharing sites accept Keynote files, really makes me re-think my commitment to Keynote. I feel menu overload when I use PowerPoint, and I’m not sure if I like the way it handles videos, graphics and the application of transitions, but this is a *small price to pay for a product that actually makes my job easier.

(* or is it.)

An editorial in The Star today by Lee Rimer is a great reminder that as we infuse our schools with computers and innovation we have to be mindful that what we are doing is adding value to the equation. The article critiques the online push of the University environment, with class notes, assignments and tests being accessed over the Internet. Students find little reason to go to class when the lecturer simply reads from the notes that are easily obtained online, and adds no deeper context for the material. Lecture halls are full of students who show up because they feel guilty, but end up spending their time on their laptops engaging in other activities.

(source MacDailyNews)

I view this is as great learning opportunity for teachers in K-12 environment. A number of teachers have begun posting their notes online, along with useful links to further resources and readings. If students lose a handout they know they can get it online, and if they are away from class they know they can obtain the notes — look over them — then bring their questions to their teacher the next time they see them. We have to be mindful that when we start putting what used to be the ‘meat’ of a lesson online we need to supplement our classroom instruction with deeper learning opportunities. I think this is one of the benefits of technology, it allows us to streamline knowledge transfer, providing more time to understand, internalize and apply that knowledge.

Moving resources online provides a great opportunity to engage students in the classroom, and encourage greater communication and understanding of the topics we as teachers enjoy teaching, so let’s embrace this benefit and not fall into the trap that has provided great frustration for Lee Rimer.

A post today by Brian at ‘Learning is Messy’ has engaged some of my over-arching thoughts on technology in education. I am a strong proponent of technology in the classroom, but I carry a mighty asterisk when I say that, because what I actually support is meaningful technology in the classroom. Brian correctly uses a wonderful example from the book ‘Understanding by Design‘ by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, which should be required reading for all teachers. The example describes a highly involved cross-curriculum activity that takes place during the fall. It uses the idea of apples and harvest as the needle to connect math, language, science and art. While all the activities are ‘fun’ and ‘engaging’ they don’t necessarily take into account the expected learning outcomes of the curriculum. Brian sums it up well when he says:

I’ll bet too, that a teacher doing this unit would overwhelmingly get very positive feedback from the students’ parents, especially any that volunteered to help with it. So would the teacher most likely do the same “unit” again next year? Even if they moved grade levels because they were told what a great job they did and how much the children SEEMED to learn?

I think this is a major problem with most attempts to integrate technology into education. Educators find out about something ‘cool’ and integrate it into their program, then have to scramble to find a way to link it with meaningful assessment. It’s a completely backwards way of thinking, and counterintuitive to creating a meaningful learning environment. I subscribe fully to the ideas presented in ‘Understanding by Design’ where, in a nut shell, they suggest all program development be started at the end (what am I trying to assess and how will I confirm those goals have been reached) and planned toward the beginning (now that I know what proof I require for assessment, what learning activities will provide the students with the knowledge and opportunities to apply this knowledge in meaningful ways).

Technology in education shouldn’t be the end goal, it should be the means to help students gain useful skills and enhance learning and understanding. In my classroom I focus on technology that allows students to share their experimental data (as access to larger data sets can provide stronger evidence for their hypothesis, while also requiring the consideration of other forms of experimental error), tools that let students collect and analyze data in ways not easily replicated with pen and paper, and ways to share with a wider audience, as this ‘authentic’ audience tends to cause students to take greater care in the creation of their final products.

The rub in all this is: at what point in time are students going to be exposed to these tools so that they can use them effectively? Curriculum’s are already bursting at the seams with ‘required content’ making setting aside time to engage students in useful technology a great challenge. What is needed is a school wide commitment to technology integration, with identified subjects where certain skills will be taught and assessed. With this foundation students can build upon their skill set and learn to figure out new technologies on their own — which I feel is one of the fundamental goals.

I concede that this is easier said than done, but I think that is in line with learning. Learning is hard, and learning takes time, effort and commitment. Too often we seek the easy ‘quick-fix’ solutions.

An interesting development out of Australia as students in Queensland may be forced to have their photos, interests, and aspirations profiled in a massive database meant to help educators keep track of their progress. The idea from Queensland’s Education Minister, Rod Welford, is to collect this data so that schools and teachers can track student progression as well as check in on how they are doing. The database would be accessible from any Internet connection, and users would have varying levels of access to the data. The biggest complaint about the plan is concern over how the data can be kept private, and who has access.

In reality all this data already exists in one form or another, so this plan is more about collecting and sorting the data into useful reports. Is it too much? That’s tough to tell. As a teacher I know that it could be useful to search for a students favourite baseball team, but if I have to look it up instead of knowing it from conversations with them I don’t think it would mean as much during future interactions.

This is an interesting idea, but it seems to have a few problems that all large database projects have: who is in charge of collecting the data and who is in charge of keeping it current and relevant? Besides, is it really useful to know that at the age of 12 Adam wanted to be a golf professional like Tiger Woods, then at age 13 he wanted to be a bioengineer? I agree this is interesting historical data, but how useful is it really?

I am a huge fan of Google Earth, and use it extensively for geotagging photos, as well as general exploring of the miraculous planet we call home. I have also had great success with using Google Earth in the classroom, and one of the short activities I like to do is plotting the relative distances of the planets from the sun onto a map of an area students are familiar with.

The activity involves using the ruler tool in Google Earth along with the placemark (push pin). Students research the relative distances of the planets from the sun with respect to the relative size of the planets. For instance, if the sun were the size of a blown up garbage bag (1300 mm) then Mercury would be the size of a coffee bean (4.5 mm) at a distance of 54m from the sun. The process continues for all nine* planets (*we can still count poor Pluto in this exercise). Once the relative distances of the planets have been plotted students can take a screen shot of their creation for inclusion in a larger assignment, or they could save their creation as a KML file for inclusion in an online document (be it a blog, or other online sharing medium that can embed a Google Map).

The idea behind this exercise is to help students understand that most of the universe is empty space, and that the distance involved in travelling between planets is vast. It allows students to demonstrate their understanding of our solar system, while applying the skills of measuring, calculation, and an understanding of relative size and distance. I have included a fantastic Excel document that I use to calculate the relative distances and sizes of the planets. It also provides relative speeds of light, thicknesses of planet crusts and more (I do not know the original source of the Excel document).

A group of scientists claim to have new evidence that shows the Andes grew 2.5km over a 4 million year span.

Carmala Garzione of the University of Rochester in New York State, US, and colleagues say the sudden rise was caused by a huge layer of dense rock dropping off the underside of the crust that forms the mountain chain.

The data showed that the Andes rose slowly for tens of millions of years, but then, between 10 and 6 million years ago, suddenly shot up by between 1.5 and 2.5 kilometres. To the researchers, this is proof for a controversial geological theory called ‘delamination’.