Each January, NASA’s Day of Remembrance honors the crew members of Apollo 1, space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and others who have given their lives in the cause of exploration. This event is especially poignant today, the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.
News and social media sites today are full of people’s thougts of where they were 25 years ago. Some of us were teachers, some of us were students, eagerly watching a real teacher take off on an exciting journey that she would share with us. We all have a memory in common—the horror of watching the explosion in real time. Looking back at the films today, it almost seems surreal. Without the Internet or social media sites, we had to comfort and console each other face-to-face: they’re gone, they’re all gone. This was a teachable moment for which we had no answers, only sharing our stunned silence and then tears. And yet, the space adventures continued with both manned and unmanned explorations that help us learn and understand more about the universe.
Let us each in our own way remember and pay tribute to these people today: Dick Scobee Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory Jarvis. May we continue to inspire our students they way they inspired us—to take on challenges and reach for the sky.
I touch the future—I teach. Christa McAuliffe

As part of the weekly, online, video series “Chemistry Now,” NSTA and NBC Learn have teamed up with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create lessons related to common, physical objects in our world and the changes they undergo every day. The series also looks at the lives and work of scientists on the frontiers of 21st century chemistry.

This week, we’re looking at isomers, specifically carvone, and how a subtle change in molecular structure can have a profound effect on how the molecule functions; in the case of carvone, how it smells and tastes. The NBC Learn collection (linked below) also includes an NBC News profile of Oliver Sacks, author of “Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.” So we present week three’s offering, molecule structure, properties. View the video, try the lessons, and let us know what you think.

Video: “Mirror Molecule: Carvone” uses carvone, a chiral molecule, to explain how the “handedness” of a molecule can change its properties — in this case giving us the differing flavors of spearmint, caraway and dill. The video is located at the bottom right of the collection of resources.

Middle school lesson: the aim of this lesson is to give students an understanding that the three-dimensional structure of a molecule or “shape”  plays a role in reactivity and chemical properties and therefore is relevant to science and technology industries.

High school lesson: in this lesson, students will learn about enantiomers and chirality and their influences on chemical reactivity.

You can use the following form to e-mail us edited versions of the lesson plans:

[contact-form 2 “ChemNow]

I’ve been following Qwiki in its beta form, and now it’s available to all. Qwiki is a multimedia resource with more than two million entries (so far). The entries are narrated (the text appears also) with illustrations and links to other related entries. After the brief introduction to a topic, additional topics and options are available.
To use Qwiki, type a topic in the search box or select a topic from the featured topics. Here are a few science-related Qwikis:

• Volcano
• Periodic Table
• Sharks

The voice in the narrative appears to be computer-generated with some issues in pronunciation (e.g., desert animals  as “dessert” animals). I’m sure there will be improvements to this alpha version, and there is a place for registered users to submit suggestions. I can see a lot of potential for the classroom, both as an informational tool and as a creative one.

As the evening wore down and the hour hand moved north of the seven, my sixth grade daughter informed me she had a big science test the next day and needed help studying. She admitted confusion about some of the concepts, but half the assessment was a take-home essay test she needed to do now, and the other half would be a multiple-choice test taken tomorrow. With the textbook in hand, we launched into a review of minerals, rocks and the rock cycle.

Now I love the earth sciences as much as the next guy, especially having taught it for years, but the textbook was confusing to the point where I had trouble keeping the necessary facts straight. Its layout felt like an pop music video, jumping around, blurring factoids in picture captions, examples in sidebars, facts in text boxes within the text, and bold text stream-of-consciousness paragraphs that strung out geological terms like a clothesline filled with random laundry. Density, quartz, streak, metamorphic, intrusive. A previous assignment she had a few days earlier was nothing more than a large crossword puzzle. Now I see why.

I took this picture. Oddly, I found myself standing between Arne Duncan and Bill Nye after Duncan

Score:  Digital 1  Molecules 0

Considering the events of the evening I couldn’t help but mentally mash together the two educational paradigms. What if the science textbook was as interactive as the literature book? What if I could step in and populate the text with my own pictures? What if teachers, parents, and students could modify or supplement the textbook to reflect the things they believe are important. What if there were strong textbook connections to the local area? If there’s one thing Montana (where I live) has plenty of, its rocks. But Montana rocks are rarely in the books except maybe for the museum showpiece we call Glacier National Park.
Open source learning in many forms has been around for the better part of this century, but lately its critical mass has pushed the concept into mainstream educational discussions. Schools and organizations are collaboratively designing their own “textbooks” and some have even served up the content onto the Internet for free download. It is not the just the advantaged districts that are pushing the envelope on this one, but there are those doing it out of need. And it is not just Americans. In fact, one of the more impressive and creative efforts in this genre that I know of is the Free High School Science Textbook (FHSST) project in South Africa.

The appearance of free, editable math and science textbooks from South Africa is not surprising. When I was at a GLOBE Learning Expedition in Cape Town a couple years ago, there really was a duality where moments of the past mingled with visions of the future. Technology allows leapfrogging since change is rarely incremental. It is more a function of punctuated evolution where digital asteroids bombard education causing expansion in directions that did not exist a year earlier, and leaps in directions that did. It also helps when there are some dedicated venture capitalists who push the vision. Mark Shuttleworth a South African entrepreneur and space tourist, and the brainchild behind many free access ventures including one of my favorites, the Freedom Toaster, is one such individual. The Shuttleworth Foundation was also a major supporter of the GLOBE conference. I cannot help but wonder if pockets of innovation and creativity like the Freedom Toaster, scattered the sparks of problem solving and inspiration.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded one of the FHSST science texts and installed it on my Kindle2 and on my iPad. The Kindle presented it just like a regular .pdf, but I could not quickly magnify or shrink the text and graphics nor interact within the document with the reckless abandon that immersive learning demands.
On my iPad, I first loaded the text into my iBook library using the iTunes interface, but it wouldn’t open. I then used Safari (the built-in web browser on iPad) to download the textbook again. I loaded it into the .pdf area of the iBook interface. It was presented beautifully with the grace of movement and scaling the iPad is famous for. But sadly I could not write on the pages, nor change the content or add comment within the margins. Then I moved to a $2.99 app called GoodReader and downloaded the book again.
Although the GoodReader technology is not invisible (meaning your mind does not consider the tech while using it—like a phone or computer mouse), it did show significant promise in the direction I was looking. I could add notes—even on faux yellow stickies. I could draw on page, and I could bookmark pages. But I still could not load pictures into the text, but maybe when the iPad has a camera, it will be possible to embed pics directly into the document as they are taken (hint-hint in case any app developers are reading this).
I don’t know how this will work on the Android OS side not having an Android device, but learning often takes place with verbs and in spite of nouns. In other words, something will work, and the better or the worse is in the touch of the beholder.
And all the above occurred close in time to President Obama’s State of the Union speech. President Obama mentioned, “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment” which is a reference to a rather notable punctuation mark in the sentence we call science education.
Sputnik was a wakeup call to America that demanded a response. As our current “Sputnik moment” unfolds, I hope we can lead the way rather than just react or follow. And maybe a good place to start is to learn from our students.

*Great Backyard Bird Count, February 18-21, 2011
Fifteen minutes is a long time by preschooler standards. And that is the minimum length of observation that can be submitted to the 14th annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), an annual four-day event led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, with Canadian partner Bird Studies Canada and sponsorship from Wild Birds Unlimited. For each type of bird you see, you just count the most you see at any one time (so you don’t accidentally count the same bird twice). To support the children’s sustained attention I bought some sand timers with times of 30 seconds, 1 minute, and 2 minutes. The children will pair up, one timer and one watcher, to count the birds they can see around the playground. Then we’ll report the numbers as instructed, the most of each species that was seen at any one time. It would be more exciting if we had a bird feeder to attract more species but we can usually count on (heh-heh) seeing mourning doves sitting on the overhead wires, a few House sparrows in the bushes, and a crow flying by.

You can count at home too, and you can count from a window— “Your counting always counts!” Visit the Great Backyard Bird Count at www.birdsource.org/gbbc/ and learn how your students can contribute data. When a greater community contributes data, scientists have more information to use to understand bird behavior.
I’m going to participate in the GBBC again this year, February 18-21, in my subUrban backyard and will let you know what I see.
What’s in your (school’s) backyard?
Peggy

Click here for the Table of Contents

• Sea-Level Rise (SciLinks: Sea Level Change, Glaciers)
• Salmonella Test (SciLinks: Salmonella, Food Safety)
• Rapid Brain Adaptation (SciLinks: Human Brain)
• Volcanic Reawakening (SciLinks:  Volcanoes also use “volcanic” as a search term for several other topics)
• Chromosome-Separating Machinery (SciLinks: Chromosomes)

Check out the Connections for this issue (January 2011). Even if the article does not quite fit with your lesson agenda, this resource has ideas for handouts, background information sheets, data sheets, rubrics, etc.