Educational Passages

Update: October 8, 2012 from the project Newsletter:

5 Maine Maritime Launches

The “State of Maine” training ship launched 5 mini-boats approximately 250 miles north of the Bahamas on May 11^th.  Within 10 days these boats got “battered” off the Carolinas by tropical storms Alberto and Beryll which blew all 5 boats across the Gulf Stream and on to the Carolina beaches.  A charter fishing boat captain told us in his 46 years he had never seen the seas so rough.  One of our boats was found by surfers on Cape Hatteras, two ended up on uninhabited islands and another went ashore on Myrtle Beach.  The 5^th boat stopped reporting several miles off the beach and probably founded coming ashore.  Four of the five boats were recovered undamaged with their rigs intact attesting to their solid construction and their ability to transit our world’s oceans.

        

Two boats were taken to Charleston, South Carolina and put back aboard the “State of Maine” to be re-launched off Cape Hatteras, another boat was re-launched by surfers, and the 4^th boat was released by the School of Coastal Studies on Cape Hatteras.  These 4 boats traveled up our east coast to Newfoundland where 2 made landfall and are currently being repaired and readied for re-launching in early October and the other 2 appear to be on their way to Europe.  All these boats can be monitored at http://www.ne fsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_ep_2012_1.html.

June 3, 2012

A group of 4th graders who are in the Communications and Math Lab groups with Molly Smith (Talents grades 3-8) have taken on the task of following one of five drifting miniboats that were launched this spring. The boat was launched Saturday, May 12 by the crew of the State of Maine (Maine Maritime). The kids are in contact with the captain and they are working on latitude, longitude, rate of speed and some of the other concepts of navigation.

Based on a workshop session at a conference on Science and Literacy held at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute a few months ago we decided to look for a way for our students to participate in a "miniboat expedition". For more about this project, see the website and articles below:

• http://www.educationalpassages.com
• http://bangordailynews.com/2011/04/15/news/hancock/students-to-launch-tiny-sailboats-from-mma-ship/?ref=relatedBox
• http://bangordailynews.com/2010/07/26/news/miniature-boat-from-maine-completes-extraordinary-journey/?ref=relatedBox
• http://www.pointseast.com/template.shtml?id=EkllZkuEAyqFSjcWAp&style=story

This project costs about $1500 a boat, but the volunteers who run it (Dick Baldwin, sailor; Lyman-Morse Boats; Maine Maritime Academy; Midcoast School of Technology, etc.) do all the work for free and the cost to our school is $350 for the GPS unit that travels on the boat and a monthly fee to monitor it. There will be opportunities at YES and HMS for that small group of students to share the project with others as it connects to curricula, we bring in guest speakers, etc.

The GPS unit on our boat connects to a company that will show the track of the boats in the project (at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_ep_2012_1.html). We don't know how many months to expect the boat to be en route, one boat arrived in Ireland after 5 months, another one took a year to travel from Puerto Rico to Portugal. The hope is that if a boat makes it to Europe the students can connect with the school that retrieves the boat.

As of May 30th the miniboats have been moved by hurricane winds are are all beached on the Carolina coasts. Today there was an article in the Hatteras newspaper about the people who found the Yarmouth boat on the beach and the next steps for getting it back out onto the ocean.

http://islandfreepress.org/2012Archives/05.29.2012-MaineStudentsSailboatIsLostAndThenFoundOnHatteras.html

Resources: Educational Passages Endeavor Wiki

cross posted at:

http://showcase.yarmouthschools.org/2012/05/educational-passages-miniboat-project.html

 

Getting started with a new Nexus 7 Tablet

This past summer I was a presenter and participant at the first Maine Google Apps Summit held here in Yarmouth, ME. The days were information filled and I learned from every presentation and conversation. This is a great model of professional development is being offered in locations all over the world by EdTechTeam in collaboration with Google Apps for Education.

At the end of the three days Mark Wagner invited participants to submit applications for implementing classroom set of Google Nexus 7 Tablets into a K-12 setting. I wrote a statement of purpose for their use in a fourth grade classroom and was asked to write in more detail as a finalist. In September I was notified that we would be receiving a set of 25 devices to pursue the goals I had outlined.

The delivery of the devices has been delayed by supply issues, but last week I purchased my own so that I could begin to become familiar with the options it will offer in the classroom when they arrive. I was pleased to find that most of the productivity apps are free from the Google Play store. I currently have the following apps (some of which were pre-installed):

• 50 States
• Adobe Reader
• Amazon Kindle
• Audioboo
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Chrome
• Clock
• Cloud Print
• ColorNote
• Countries of the World
• Currents
• Dropbox
• Earth
• Edmodo
• Email
• Evernote
• Gallery
• Gmail
• Google 
• Local
• Maps
• Math Bingo (pd)
• Math Mate
• Messenger
• Milion Moments
• Navigation
• OneNote
• People
• Play Books
• Play Magazines
• Play Movies & TV
• Play Music
• Play Store
• Pocket
• PowerVocab
• Puffin Free
• Settings
• Skitch
• Socrative
• Talk
• TED Talks
• Voice Search
• Voice Search Advanced
• Wallet
• Words Words Words
• YouTube

I am looking for more educational apps that can be used to develop Math, Writing and Reading skills with fourth graders, but my biggest focus will be on the productivity apps of searching, notetaking, recording voices and the various ways we can access ebooks. Richard Byrne's Android for Schools blog is a good resource and I appreciate that he is out there checking out apps and learning options

I will be purchasing cases for the Nexus 7s as we have a practice of providing cases for any student 1:1 devices. One question we will need to resolve is setting up individual accounts for students that allow for some form of institutional purchases of apps if we determine that we want some for all students that are not free.

I was looking for apps that would read books aloud and I have found Blio and a voice for the text to speech. The app is free and the voice is $2.99. I downloaded a few books and this has potential for guided reading books for students to use at home and in the classroom.

The fourth grade classroom has been selected and I have been meeting with the teacher to plan for the tablets, but the students and parents do not yet know about this exciting opportunity.

Maine Google Apps Summit August 2012

This was our first year hosting the first Maine Google Apps Summit. Alice Barr is a Google Certified Teacher and she facilitated this event. We had an inspirational keynote by Jaime Casat, Chief Education Evangelist at Google, Inc. and sessions offered by regional educators as well as international members of the EdTech Team.

I taught these sessions:

• Blogger for the Classroom
• From Video to Youtube   
• Using Forms for Surveys of Parents and Students
• Using Picasa Web Albums with Google Sites and Blogger Blogs

Maine Forests Teacher Tour Adventure

This summer I joined fifteen educators on the Northern Forests Teacher Tour sponsored by the Maine Tree Foundation. I had looked at this option several times over the years and the tour that was based in at Leen's Lodge on the shore of West Grand Lake worked into my summer. We were warmly greeted by Pat Maloney who is the state coordinator of Maine Project Learning Tree, the state forester for Washington County and Project Learning Tree Facilitators who immersed us in activities of creating a forest plot, perusing the Project Learning Tree K-12 guides and practicing lessons using computer access to GIS to view worldwide data.

Early the second morning we traveled to the 100,000+ acre Baskahegan forest that is owned an managed by the Milliken Family. This forest has been certified to follow sustainability and biodiversity practices that show exemplary stewardship. The foresters explained the complex management tools that are used to harvest stands and guarantee the ongoing availability of mature trees. A forester walks each stand of the forest, mapping the types of trees, the health of each one, the deer or wildlife activity and records everything on a GPS device. The information recorded is then uploaded to GIS so that in an office setting a team can click anywhere on a map and see the specific information about a particular stand. 

The actual piece of equipment (called a Processor/Harvester) used to harvest trees costs $200,000-$400,000 and has the capacity to select trees, cut them down, strip the branches and pile them up by size and type. I took this video with my phone:

From the forest we traveled to the Stinson Wind Farm to see some of the windmills that were built on logging roads by First Wind. The 80 foot towers are equipped with anemometers and mini-weather stations that feed information to computers that automatically adjust the turbines or they can be managed offsite from remote computers. 

The second day we traveled to a large investor partnership landholding (600,000+ acres) managed by Wagner Forest Management Company. There we saw more large, sophisticated equipment that selected, cut and piled trees so that the next machine could strip the branches and stack the trees for loading on lumber trucks. Here are photos and videos of a Feller/Buncher and a Delimber at work.

One of the many new learnings for me as we toured these forested roads was how much attention is being paid to the importance of creating culverts under the logging roads that will allow the passage of salmon, brook trout and other water dwellers. Some of the culverts are taller than a person and cost over $20,000 to build. The engineers talked about the efforts being made to develop designs and materials that will make culverts easier to build and more affordable. As teachers we started talking about how we could use this real issue as a design challenge in the classroom setting.

We then went to the Domtar Paper Mill which is owned by Chinese interests. Every few minutes a truck full of logs would pull into the yard, huge sets of logs would be unloaded by some of the world's largest cranes to be processed into chips and then sheets of pulp. The sheets of pulp are stacked and wrapped in a warehouse, trucked to Eastport, ME and loaded into the holds of ships that take them to China. Once in China, the pulp sheets are finished into paper.

Some of the participants on the tour were members of the Downeast Lakes Land Trust which works closely with businesses and residents of this part of Maine. As individuals and a group they work to educate people about the need to preserve shoreline and watersheds for the protection of water, recreation pursuits and the overall health of the environment.

I look forward to connecting what I learned to the 4th grade unit on Trees, Plants and Forest Ecology and other environmental education opportunities in our school.