Tomorrow, April 14, Mission Specialists Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is scheduled to talk with students at Eastern Guilford High School in North Carolina, and all of the 71,000 students in Eastern Guilford School District.
Caption from NASA: STS-131 Mission Specialist Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, attired in a training version of her shuttle launch and entry suit, poses for a photo prior to the start of an ingress/egress training session in the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Photo Credit: NASA
Metcalf-Lindenburger is one of three teachers selected in 2004 as astronauts. NASA is committed to help education out. After the Challenger disaster, and the death of “teacher in space” Christa McAuliffe, NASA finally determined to make teachers into astronauts rather than fly “civilians.”
Haley Miller
Guilford Public Schools, Guilford, N.C.
336-370-3200 millerh3@gcsnc.com
April 12, 2010
MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-048
Orbiting Space Shuttle Astronauts — Including Former Teacher — Call North Carolina Students
WASHINGTON — Astronauts orbiting 220 miles above Earth will speak with students in Gibsonville, N.C., on Wednesday, April 14. The call with the students and space shuttle Commander Alan Poindexter and Mission Specialists Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson and Clay Anderson will take place at 1:06 p.m. EDT at Eastern Guilford High School in Gibsonville.
Eastern Guilford High School is hosting students from Eastern Guilford Middle School, Gibsonville Elementary, McLeansville Elementary, Rankin Elementary and Sedalia Elementary for the downlink. The school also will broadcast the event to the entire Guilford County Schools district, which serves more than 71,000 students.
The astronauts launched Monday, April 5, aboard space shuttle Discovery from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the 13-day mission to the International Space Station, the crew will deliver science experiments and supplies; take three spacewalks to switch out a gyroscope on the station’s truss, or backbone; install a spare ammonia storage tank and return a used one; and retrieve a Japanese experiment from the station’s exterior.
Metcalf-Lindenburger is one of three teachers selected to fly as shuttle mission specialists in the 2004 Educator Astronaut Class. She operates the shuttle’s robotic arm. Without robotics, major accomplishments like building the station, repairing satellites in space and exploring other worlds would not be possible.
Students have been preparing for the downlink by conducting NASA engineering design challenges and implementing agency robotics resources and activities into K-12 classrooms. A science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, club was organized to increase participation and interest, particularly by female students.
The school’s guidance department also is collaborating with local universities to help students investigate and explore STEM opportunities beyond graduation. During follow up in-district workshops in April and May, a NASA Aerospace Education Services Program specialist will demonstrate how to access and use NASA resources in K-12 curricula.
Eastern Guilford High School employee Michael Woods, a former Aerospace Education Services Project specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., is leading the downlink effort. In December 2009, NASA awarded Guilford County Schools a two-year grant of nearly $1 million to help middle and high school teachers develop science lessons using the space agency’s content.
The event is part of a series with educational organizations in the U.S. and abroad to improve teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The in-orbit call is part of Teaching From Space, a NASA project that uses the unique environment of human spaceflight to promote learning opportunities and build partnerships with the kindergarten through 12th grade education community.
NASA Television will air video of the astronauts during the downlink. For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit:
Here’s another opportunity to put real, cutting edge technology in your classroom. In fact, your kids could probably invent all sorts of new uses for it.
Have you even heard of this stuff? Can you use it, live, with the equipment you’ve got?
Blaise Aguera y Arcas of MicroSoft demonstrated augmented-reality maps using the power of Bing maps, Flickr, Worldwide Telescope, Video overlays and Photosynth, to an appreciative and wowed audience at TEDS:
My prediction: One more advance in computer technology that classrooms will not see in a timely or useful manner.
But have you figured out how to use this stuff in your geography, history, economics or government classes? Please tell us about it in comments. Give examples and links, please.
2. Unbeknownst to [high school students and their parents], and without their authorization, [high school officials] have been spying on the activities of [the students] by Defendants’ indiscrimina[te] use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students by the School District….23…. Plaintiffs were for the first time informed of [this] capability and practice by the School District when … an Assistant Principal at Harriton High School[] informed minor Plaintiff that the School District was of the belief that minor Plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the School District….
24. [The minor Plaintiff’s father] thereafter verified, through [the Assistant Principal], that the School District in fact has the ability to remotely activate the webcam contained in a students’ personal laptop computer issued by the School District at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam, all without the knowledge, permission or authorization of any persons then and there using the laptop computer.
If this was indeed done, and if it was done without adequately notifying the students and their parents, this was clearly tortious, likely a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and possibly a statutory violation as well (though I haven’t looked closely at the statutory details). It is also appalling — school officials spying on children in their parents’ homes without the children’s and parents’ permission. Who thinks up such things?
Who thinks them up, and can we get them to wear a badge so we know they’re not in our school?
The suit filed is a civil suit. Assuming its allegations to be correct, I think the plaintiffs may want to add RICO sections to the complaint. Under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act a pattern of practices like illegal use of the webcams could easily be evidence to trigger RICO penalties, which included treble damages. Such a charge would also scare the textbooks out of school officials thinking they might want to do this in the future.
Comments at the Volokh Conspiracy, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and in the AP story in the WaPo all raised the spectre of child pornography. If the computers caught images of children in their bedrooms, it might automatically qualify as child porn — and this would greatly complicate the case, and ramp up the noise surrounding it.
School districts who issue laptops to students, or teachers, should review the story and their own procedures and regulations.
But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.
Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
What would your bus drivers say?
(File under “If you teach them, they will learn — and behavior problems will fade away.”)
Don’t miss the end of the article:
A ride through mountains on a drizzly afternoon can be unpredictable, even on the Internet Bus. Through the windows on the left, inky clouds suddenly parted above a ridge, revealing an arc of incandescent color.
“Dude, there’s a rainbow!” shouted Morghan Sonderer, a ninth grader.
A dozen students looked up from their laptops and cellphones, abandoning technology to stare in wonder at the eastern sky.
“It’s following us!” Morghan exclaimed.
“We’re being stalked by a rainbow!” Jerod said.
More:
These students attend Empire High School in Vail, Arizona, near Tucson. It’s a digital high school, in a district that appears to me to be well above average in family income and technology smarts among parents who vote for school board members — maybe in school board members, too. The article says, “The Vail District, with 18 schools and 10,000 students, is sprawled across 425 square miles of subdivision, mesquite and mountain ridges southeast of Tucson. Many parents work at local Raytheon and I.B.M. plants. Others are ranchers.”
Empire high has a self-directed learner model — looks good online, and judging from the news article, it looks good in practice. These aren’t my students, maybe not your students, either.
It’s a pretty good rundown of the fight between Keynes and Hayek, conducted mostly after Keynes’ death in economics classrooms and central banks world wide.
You gotta admire the bravery of this guy, who came to fatherhood a little late (he claims), and struggles with the fatherliness expectations of a precocious child:
When my wife returned [from a vacation], we settled back into our routine, consisting of 1-2 days per week when we eat dinner out as a family. These events can also be challenging, as our daughter is one of those kids who just cannot sit still for anything. She seems well connected to her surroundings and engages with us and others, but she is perpetual motion personified. So imagine my surprise when the littlest tornado actually sat in her chair for an entire meal!
My wife’s new secret weapon was a series of iPhone apps created especially for toddlers that one of her California girlfriends had recommended. The most popular with our daughter is Letter Tracer, which works as the name suggests. So my daughter was occupied by learning to write her letters. The device and screen provided the engagement that pen and paper hadn’t, and she delighted at being able to successfully trace all the letters of the alphabet, smiling and exclaiming “Look Daddy, I did it!” each time she completed a new tracing. My daughter was having a blast learning how to write her letters, and her parents were enjoying not just her growth but a nice restaurant experience as well.
So, he got his daughter a de-activated iPhone. Seriously.
I’d love to see what Checker Finn would have done in that situation, or Diane Ravitch, or even dear old B. F. Skinner.
The discussion is good, too. Why can’t this guy be our tech director, in a district where getting technology is like asking for a French dictionary at Republican Party HQ?
And that got me thinking: What if Edith Wharton had Facebooked? Had she lived in our time and communicated digitally, I wonder what her literature would be like. Looking at five days of cursive writing and personal letters made me realize that her compulsion to jot down her thoughts was no different than ours today when we tweet about what we had for lunch or share some fab link we just discovered. The difference between a letter written longhand and a Facebook post is that one takes a little bit longer (and leaves a more lasting trace), but the purpose is the same. Whether we live on a grand, Whartonian scale or a quieter, more ordinary one, we feel more significant when we share intimacies about ourselves with others.
There’s a good warm-up and/or journaling exercise in there for literature teachers.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish reads well, and it reveals evolution as easy to understand from a morphological view of life as revealed by fossils and modern animals.
Shubin released the illustrations from the book for teachers to use — a rather rare and great contribution to evolution.
KERA Television has a marvelous short film profile of Jack Kilby, who won the Nobel in physics for his invention of what we now call “the computer chip.”
Late in his life, Jack Kilby holds his first integrated circuit, which is encased in plastic. Photo via Texas Instruments, via Earth & Sky
Teachers should check out the film and use it — it’s a great little chapter of Texas history, science history, and U.S. history. It’s an outstanding explanation of a technological development that revolutionized so much of our daily life, especially in the late 20th century. At 8 minutes and 37 seconds, the film is ideal for classroom use.
2009 marks the 50th anniversary of Kilby’s filing for a patent on an integrated circuit. He’s been honored by the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. Despite the stupendous value of his invention, Kilby’s name is far from a household name even in North Dallas, home of Texas Instruments. Robert Noyce, who came up with almost exactly the same idea at almost exactly the same moment, is similarly ignored.
Shouldn’t today’s high school students know about Kilby and Noyce? Not a class period goes by that I don’t use a device powered by Kilby’s invention; nor does one pass that I don’t have to admonish at least one student for misuse of such a device, such as an iPod, MP3 player, or cell phone. It’s difficult to think of someone whose invention has greater influence on the life of these kids, hour by hour — but Kilby and his invention don’t get their due in any text I’ve seen.
It’s a great film — original and clever animation, good interviews, and it features Kilby’s charming daughter, and the great journalist and historian of technology T. R. Reid. Don’t you agree that it’s much better than most of the history stuff we have to show?
Texas history standards require kids to pay brief homage to inventors in the 20th century. Kilby is not named in the standards, however, and so he and his invention are ignored as subjects of history study. You ought to fix that in your classroom, teachers.
Pleasant to watch, this time-lapse composition highlights the light pollution aspect of increasing urbanization across the United States. The photographer, a Dutch architect, notes that each streak of light represents a city, as he flies across the American Midwest to touchdown in San Francisco (SFO). It’s a visual definition of urbanization, isn’t it?
On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal – it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city!
Luckily the flight was half empty, so I was able to set up an improvised stabilizer mound made up of my bags, pillows, and blankets for my camera to sit on.
We were around the midwest at the beginning of the clip, and there were fewer cities once we hit the rockies. the bridge at the end is the san mateo bridge.
Technique: 1600iso; beginning – 1 (30sec) exposure / 45secs; end – 1 (4sec) exposure / 10 secs; total elapsed time: around 3 hours?
Good teachers constantly search for good ideas and effective ways to make learning fun, efficient and thorough. So the search for new material and new ideas is constant.
Same on the web. Where are the good blogs? Where are the useful blogs? (Many days readers here ask those questions repeatedly.)
As often, slam-poetry veteran (and former teacher) Taylor Mali has important advice for people who trust computers too much: “The Impotence of Proofreading.”
Um, this probably isn’t really safe for work, at least not in Texas or Alabama, and maybe not advisable for classroom use either. But every English teacher in your school will have horror stories to add:
Am I the only one who thinks that reading a lot is a great way to overcome these problems?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Older son Kenny nears graduation there, but we still get the newsletters to parents bragging on the school, and there is much to brag about. The Good Folks at the University of Texas at Dallas asked us to share this story. It’s right up the alley of a blog that worries about education, so share it I will.
After all, when was the last time you heard a teacher raving about students using their cell phones and Twitter during class? (Yes, I’m about three weeks behind the curve on this.)
Here’s the story from the press office at UTD:
ATEC Student’s Twitter Video Makes Waves
Project Documents History Prof’s Use of Popular Service as a Teaching Tool
June 11, 2009
An Arts and Technology student’s video account of a professor’s classroom experiment with Twitter is making waves on the World Wide Web, capturing thousands of viewers on YouTube and prompting an article in U.S. News & World Report.
UT Dallas graduate student Kim Smith’s video, “The Twitter Experiment,” shows how Dr. Monica Rankin, assistant professor of history in the School of Arts and Humanities, uses Twitter to engage her 90-student history class in discussion. The communication application helps overcome the logistical issues involved in having scores of students interact in a short time span and encourages shy students to participate in the course.
“The video is a living example of what my Content Creation and Collaboration course with Dan Langendorf was all about: using emerging media technologies as a tool for education, collaboration with other fields, and documenting the experience for everyone to have access to,” said Smith.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets users send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets, in short posts of 140 characters or less. The Twitter video was a course project for Smith’s digital video class.
The video, which took roughly 20 hours to record and edit, was shot during two class periods, one at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. Classmate Joe Chuang helped with the video and editing.
The collaboration of Smith and Rankin began when Smith documented a class trip to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2008. They kept in touch via Facebook, and developed the idea of using Twitter in the classroom at the beginning of the Spring 2009 semester.
Smith worked out details on Twitter with Emerging Media and Communication (EMAC) faculty members Dr. Dave Parry and Dean Terry, who referred her to individuals who had done similar experiments. To get students comfortable with using Twitter in a classroom setting, Smith created a simple how-to video and attended class to help Rankin introduce the idea to her students.
The video was first released on Facebook; Terry and Parry both tweeted about it on Twitter and it went global within 48 hours. New-media icon Howard Rheingold tweeted about it, which helped it further circulate in the “Twitterverse.”
“I have gotten several direct messages from people saying that they were more ‘traditional’ and would not have considered using the social networking and micro-blogging tools in this way, but opened their minds after seeing the video,” said Smith.
A few weeks later Smith posted the video on YouTube, and an entirely different wave of viewers picked up on it. On Monday, June 1, “The Twitter Experiment” registered 500 views in a few hours. Read Write Web and other popular blogs had picked up the video, causing views to skyrocket.
“I love my classes and experience at UT Dallas and want to master how to use what I learn in EMAC to help professors like Dr. Rankin, who are willing to consider new technologies intelligently and experiment with what they offer,” said Smith.
UTD, where the football team is still undefeated. Seriously, have you thought about using twitter in class, for coursework? Please tell us the story in comments.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering just how I could make this work, in a district where cell phone use by students is against the rules (ha!), and where students are discouraged from using laptops in class. In Irving ISD, where every high school kid gets a laptop, this could offer some great possibilities (anybody from Irving reading this; anybody try it yet?). I’ll have to check to see if our network can handle such traffic, and I’ll have to get an account on Twitter; we have 87 minute class blocks, and smaller classes, but it’s tougher to get kids to discuss in high school.
With the layoffs in Dallas ISD, support for new technology tricks in classrooms is essentially non-existent. Can I do this as a guerrilla teaching project and make it work before I get caught?
I may have to get some of these people at UTD on the phone. If you’ve already overcome these problems, put that in comments, too, please.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Nice pictures — the wallpaper is cooler than Google’s rather sterile white background. I’m not much fond of the way Bing shows images, with some down the side when you check out another, but without any identifying data to help you figure out which ones to check out.
But I stumbled into a major problem: At least on DDT, Bing favors the Tinfoil Hat Brigades™, featuring crank science almost exclusively on the first page in my early searches, compared to Google’s pointing first to the hard science.
Importantly, this tells me that Bing is not safe to assign to students doing research.
Bing will bear watching all summer. Can they get it up to speed by the opening of schools in the fall?
DDT (from its trivial name, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) is one of the most well-known synthetic pesticides. It is a chemical with a long, unique, …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT – Cached – Similar –
The general use of the pesticide DDT will no longer be legal in the United States after today, ending nearly three decades of application during which time … http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/ddt/01.htm – Cached – Similar –
“We have the worst DDT hotspot in the entire US,” he said. “That we’re still stuck with this horrible legacy decades later is awful.” From 1947 to 1971, …
A plan to cap a vast, long-neglected deposit of the pesticide DDT on the ocean floor off Southern California got its first public airing Tuesday — nearly …
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090623/ap_on_re_us/us_ocean_ddt – Similar –
by Rachel Carson, Edward O. Wilson – 2002 – Nature – 378 pages
Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters” (Peter Matthiessen,…
books.google.com/books?isbn=0618249060… –
Rachel Carson sounded the initial alarm against DDT, but represented the science of DDT… The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a … http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.html – Cached – Similar –
A plan to cap a vast, long-neglected deposit of the pesticide DDT on the ocean floor off Southern California got its first public… Seattle Times 23 hours ago
DDT (from its trivial name, d ichloro d iphenyl t richloroethane) is one of the most well-known synthetic pesticides. It is a chemical with a long, unique, and controversial … Properties and chemistry · History · Environmental impact
In professional wrestling a DDT is any move in which the wrestler falls down or backwards to drive a held opponent’s head into the mat. The classic DDT is performed by putting the …
JunkScience.com spotlights and debunks faulty scientific data and analysis used to promote special agendas, such as those of activist groups, personal injury lawyers, regulators …
Exposure to DDT, DDE, and DDD occurs mostly from eating foods containing small amounts of these compounds, particularly meat, fish and poultry. High levels of DDT can affect the …
When people hear the word, “pesticides,” they often associate it with something very negative. And many times, they’ll soon think of DDT. DDT is one of the most famous pesticides …
DDT Ban Takes Effect [EPA press release – December 31, 1972] The general use of the pesticide DDT will no longer be legal in the United States after today, ending nearly three …
DDT. The Wall Street Journal Endorses Use of DDT. The Wall Street Journal endorses using DDT on its Editorial Opinion page (8/16/07) stating: “Opponents of …
… insect pests; the term commonly refers to chemical agents only. Chemical Insecticides
….. Click the link for more information.. First introduced during the 1940s, it killed insects that spread disease and feed on crops. Swiss scientist Paul Müller was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering (1939) DDT‘s …
DDT or 2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)-1,1,1,-trichloroethane, chlorinated hydrocarbon compound used as an insecticide insecticides, chemical, biological, or other agents used to destroy …
The third entry goes to a wrestling maneuver, the fifth entry is the biggest crank science site. The ninth entry plunges back into crank science at its worst. This is much improved since I tried it last night and got nothing but crank science (Bing is improving quickly).
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 