2 weeks to School!

Wow--actually, less than 2 weeks!  I have to get my classroom set up next week, because the following week I will be in New York for a Dual Enrollment Workshop, after which, my Astronomy and Oceanography students will be able to opt for college credit.
The STEM class winds down to its end and what a ride it has been. I have never seen so much information concentrated into a short time as in this class, but what a great mental workout! The class taught me everything I expected and more! I have so many ideas and so many resources for next year that I don't know if I can enact all of them! I think the best approach may be to sprinkle bits of web 2.0 and _TEM into my Science classes a little every week. That will give me Christmas break to consolidate a plan for using the GCC unit in my Meteorology segment with which I always end the term. By second term in February, I will be tweaking what worked and can sprinkle more bits into the second term's plans.  It's going to be a great year!

Greenhouse Gases, Feedbacks and Scenarios

• The relationship between increasing amounts of GHG (green house gases) and GCC (global climate change) is becoming clear to people who understand scientific methods and math. As GHG volumes in the atmosphere rise, temperatures rise. The number of feedbacks (ie. the positive and negative effects of clouds and  aerosols, ocean currents, ice and precipitation) as discussed on   NASA's Climate Uncertainties page make it difficult at best to predict how fast negative consequences may occur. Another discussion of the problem can be found at the NOAA Paleoclimatology site. (The NOAA website has a great list of references such as Teachers' Manual to Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, too.)
• Climate models are useful to help predict what will happen to the climate system as one or another forcing changes, and how it will affect the other parameters involved. (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Global Climate Modeling Page ) Models for GCC are incredibly complicated and are constantly being updated by better computer software and hardware.
• The IPCC emission scenarios serve as arbitrary models to predict the climatic consequences of changes in two or three human-controlled parameters. The scenarios were developed in 2000, so they are a decade plus old, and we should be able to see which parameters have held true in the last 10 years, and whether any scenario came close to predicting the small slice of data the last ten years represents; ideally we could introduce a scenario like A2 and add the Balanced energy piece that the A1B scenario has in order to reflect the increased use of alternative energy sources.

Forcings and Feedback: Global Climate Change and the Chespeake Bay  

This week's material was eye-opening, not so much as new information on global climate change, but with the information about how difficult it is for people to believe scientific information. We shared information about how not to make the preponderance of evidence depressing to students, but WHAT A JOB!
 I've been thinking of utilizing interactive notebooks this year, but am trying to think how to combine an actual notebook with a student blog. I like to have a real object to refer to from time to time, and the reality is none of us is online all the time. Maybe the notebook can serve as a sounding board to keep ideas and work them out while the blog could serve as a place to crystallize/summarize what has been concluded. I'm trying that myself with a marble notebook next to my computer as I read/reflect and now my Blog entry to try to summarize the weeks' learning.
 The forcings that are most at work in my area here near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay are the sheer numbers of people that live in the Bay's air shed adding the carbon dioxide from our daily use of fossil fuels. Our cars and power plants are adding more and more greenhouse gases with each car trip we make and each degree we turn the air conditioning down as we try to get through the heat wave through which we have been suffering.
 One of the feedbacks that we are experiencing is probably this heat wave! Others we will observe will be the continued rise in sealevel, adding more water to our Bay and drowning present shorelines.  Thirteen of the Chesapeake Bay's islands have been submerged already, according to the National Wildlife Federation's article on the effects of global climate change.  http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming/Effects-on-Wildlife-and-Habitat/Estuaries-and-Coastal-Wetlands/Chesapeake-Bay.aspx  As the surface area of water around us increases, there will be more water to absorb more heat to add to the local atmosphere. I have found many lesson ideas at the website www.baybackpack.com/, although I have not been able to access it today to highlight one or two. Perhaps their server has been affected by the power losses that happened in this past weekend's storms.

NASA, STEM and PBL meet the needs of 21st century education because the NASA piece adds interest for students.  When teaching Earth Science, my colleagues and I dedided to teach the Astronomy unit first, in order to grab the students' attention.  It works--students have a natural curiosity about space.
Then, when you have the students' attention, Web 2.0 tools are a natual fit to collaborate on a product to express their findings and communicate to their peers and the outside world, both parts of STEM and PBL.

I am excited that this class will be addressing the integration of Web 2.0 tools into the classroom, as that is what our school is trying to do this year.

• My first thought was to incorporate blog entries as homework to keep an ear to the ground as to who is understanding the content and who needs more assistance.
• I also have been experimenting with the use of shared folders in Dropbox with my colleagues at school. Not much activity yet. I have used Dropbox personally since February or so just as a replacement for a flash drive. (Dratted flash drives are never where you need them!) My next step with Dropbox is implementing useful shared folders for my classes. My students keep a running weather journal and I am thinking of having it as a spread sheet in Dropbox rather than a page in a notebook or a list on the board.
• Another thought is the use of personal electronic devices in class. Many students now have laptops, ipads or smartphones. A colleague has her students put them on the desk during class, and use them if/when appropriate as a tool. I will test those waters this year.
• I like to use some YouTube videos now, but would like to have my students do more video projects themselves.
• The Facebook idea is also intriguing. I know most of my students have Facebook pages, and would love to see/hear how others are incorporating it.