Building STEM Community

How can you not like this tool? It’s one of my favorites from a workshop offered by the Kaneb Center: Teaching Well Using Technology . Jamie Antonelli and I attended the workshop today. Perhaps unlike my favorite tool linked above, many of the tools and tips we received were quite useful.

The workshop uses a wikispace site, on which Jamie and I created a project page, advancing a project (also hosted on a wiki) begun last year.

Without any pretense of coherence, below is a list of highlights from the workshop.

One very interesting tool to which I”ve just now been introduced is EtherPag (or in this case, a free version called TitanPad. This tool allows anyone to set up a “backchannel” during a workshop…something like a chat room where notes can be gathered and responded to as the workshop advances. Everyone can type into it at the same time. Lots of online presentations use a backchannel of this sort, and I find them helpful. But this is the first time I’d run across a free version which can be integrated into almost any other technology (such as a wiki home page for the workshop.) If I had just employed the correct rule of thumb–”if you can think of it, it exists online, and is free”–I’d have found it earlier:)

Another new tool for me is grooveshark (mentioned only incidentally in the workshop, but of great interest to me.) Grooveshark enables you to share music, even in a widget; my first experiment with it is here.

Jamie Antonelli found the “insert invisible frame” solution to navigating through a single slide in Prezi. (I’ll hyperlink his solution from here when I gain access to it.)

McKeechie’s Teaching Tips was recommended as a great useful text for folks teaching in higher ed.

Here’s a Google slideshow illustrating 66 ways to use Google Forms in a classroom context.

More resources used and/or recommended in the workshop can be found here. Enjoy.

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At yesterday’s meeting we introduced and set up a “topic of the week” (TOW) strategy for adding interesting content to our blogs.  I’m proposing that we try that strategy here, “in public” but not “to the public”, in our management blog, prior to rolling it out to our delicate shoot of new subscribers (137 as of this posting.)  I’d like to propose that at the same time we take a little time to see what strategies successful social media strategists recommend. If we like what we produce in the “topic of the week” series after two or three weeks, we can then advance the series as a whole, or perhaps just a few blogs at a time, to the MichianaSTEM Community blog.  So, Val, would you kick off the weekly topical discussion here in the management blog?  I think this is a very good idea and I want to help make it work.  There is some risk that keeping it to ourselves at first may quench enthusiasm.  Let’s try not to let that happen.  If it’s a workable idea, we should be able to push it into existence here, first, and then into a broader stream.  I’m no expert, but I think that’s a sensible approach to managing our public profile.

Please click on the image above to visit a site with an interesting compilation of suggestions for effective blogging.  I think that the very first suggestion is one we should talk about in particular;  we don’t interact very much with other environments.  The GK-12 blog might help change that, but we should explore other avenues, also.  Additional recommendations in this list of 17 suggestions might help us think through our own approach to blogging.

One way to encourage interactions with other blogs is through a blogroll, where links to other community sites are right at hand for everyone who interacts with our blogs.  Perhaps each of us could add one blog to the blogroll (accessible under the links tab in the management interface) from our areas of interest and/or expertise. For a model, see the blogroll (though thee are all internal sites, and what we need are external sites) for the MichianaSTEM blog.

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Swanson Primary Center, like some 70 other Michiana K-12 schools, has been an active collaborator in Michiana STEM education. At least five teachers from Swanson have attended NDeRC events. This year, Swanson has hosted two programs that bring scientists into classrooms–NANO (above) and BioEYES (below). Moreover, they have put together some very nice online presentations. Kudos to this South Bend Community School Corporation school for their efforts to reach out to university partners.

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Who wouldn’t want a few moments watching nesting eagles, live? Join several thousand other folks, just for fun. (Click on the lower “play” button if you want to watch the embedded version here; clicking the main screen will redirect you to the host page at Ustream.) To see more, visit the raptor resource web site.

Visit their site at www.raptorresource.org

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Ten members of the Notre Dame extended Research Community are heading to DC this weekend for the GK-12 annual meeting. These meetings are extraordinarily rich times for reviewing what others are doing in university/K-12 relations across the country. This year’s event will be marked by some controversy, since the NSF has announced that GK-12 will be phased out, with no new programs being accepted. This year’s NDeRC contingent–two university faculty, two K-12 teachers, and six graduate students–will be looking for ways to add value to our integrated STEM community here in Michiana, and will share with other GK-12 programs some of what we’ve been busy doing here. Embedded above are slides from last year’s trip. Watch for reports next week!

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