CSRA Update (Sunday, noon): Go ahead and work on your projects. The powers-that-be (i.e, the Departmental Ethics Committee) decided that the project met the conditions of not needing a review...the ones available actually decided this on Thursday (the day I asked them if a review was needed), but it just took them awhile to figure out if they needed to hear from all committee members about this (because one is on sabbatical). Due dates are as before except that I will accept the lab reports for the first one as late as Noon on the Friday following the stipulated due date without any penalty. You still need to be prepared to do your presentation on the Tuesday.
For those of you who questioned whether an ethics review was necessary for this project: My decision that it wasn't is based on the Faculty of Ed policy document (which I've helpfully copied and provided on the door of my office and the classroom so you can look at it). Look specifically at the bottom of Page 2, the first full paragraph on Page 4, and examples B & C (pages 10 & 11; both of which are far more personally intrusive than your projects are and which did not need review) for the reasons for my decision that a review was not necessary. And if I decide that, then there's no requirement to submit it to them....that's supposedly the point of hiring professionals to do this teaching stuff. By going further with your queries you generated the typical response of administration which is "When in doubt, require the paperwork to be done.".....unsurprisingly the Departmental Ethics Review Committee decided that a review was not necessary, but them deciding that still took some time (altho' a full review takes 2 weeks).
NEW free book from National Academies Press "A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas" here∞
Free Book on K-8 Science from the National Academies Press∞ and another on using labs in high school science [here∞] AND "How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom" [here∞]
- "The top ten jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn't exist in 2004." - "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."(Richard Riley, former Secretary of Education in the United States) ....in this context, approaching things using a same-old, same-old approach is unlikely to be successful.
Determined to lecture? Forced to lecture? Then you'd better check out Are Lectures a Thing of the Past?∞ by Linda Cronin Jones which has a bunch of things to think about that she argues will help you lecture effectively. (Another resource here∞.)
Free book chapters from NSTA Press∞ (the National Science Teachers Association Press).
Welcome to the writing & note-keeping tool (called "a wiki") that you can use with your projects & class. It will allow you to keep notes, your comments, your data, etc. on-line. You can also use it to write an entire research paper, inserting graphics, tables, graphs and so on. New to wiki's? Go to GettingStarted for a brief introduction.
There are "simple" ways of using this tool, but as you use it more and more you'll find that there can be quite sophisticated and powerful ways of using this tool as well. But you don't have to use it that way! If you don't have lots of experiences with computers, just use it as a note-taking tool at first....and then learn how to use the more advanced features as you go along.
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