I truly suggest that if a school has access or is going to get access to the Internet, it's definitely the wave of the educational future. I think its limits are limitless. I believe that it's limited only by the creativity of the teachers involved. If you can't find something on the Internet to use in your classroom, I would be amazed. It's a boundless educational tool of the future.
The next level of our course, which is usually the third semester, is basically Genetics. Most of the things that you see listed here are Genetic sites. A site that is, by my definition, an unbelievable resource is the Mendel Web. Whoever put this together spent incredible time and effort putting together a useable resource on Mendel for teachers. His entire text is on-line. It's in English, it's in the original German, it's annotated, and if you go through it, they actually have teacher questions, research themes. It's a phenomenal linked site for Genetics. Let me just take you to using Mendel Web table of contents. As you can see here, they have a syllabus they have other World Wide Web sites.
This (Virtual Fly Lab) is from Cal State and basically it allows students to breed fruit flies on-line. It's one of the most interactive sites that I've actually ever seen. Let me take you down, scroll through the information. I'll show you how you can breed fruit flies.
You would go to where it says where to begin, and choose designing a cross. And basically what comes up (Design and Mate Flies page), and at Sun Microsystems it comes up very quickly. It will not at your school. It will take time to download all these color graphics, which it gives your students opportunities to pick on each other, take apart the mouse. The only thing nice about it is that this site, once you're actually in, and you have it downloaded to your site, it runs remarkably quickly. So students can breed fruit flies. As you can see, a really nice color graphics. Let me do a demonstration. Let me cross an Ebony body colored fruit fly, female, with a male Purple-eyed fruit fly. Those would be my traits. We'll scroll to the bottom and you choose, doing your cross - perform the cross. It says mate the two flies. Click on mate the flies. The computer at Cal State basically crosses the flies and once again what comes up very quickly at Sun Microsystem, and it won't at your school, are the graphics of what you actually crossed. These are the parents, this is the Ebony female, this is the Purple male, and the offspring that you get are basically all wild type. The two traits that we chose here are recessive. Students can manipulate that data to determine dominance and recessive or sex-linked. And you may then cross the offspring, which is basically the test cross by clicking on the offspring and mating the flies and they can verify their hypotheses on sexual inheritance of fruit flies.
Note: The EnviroNet site has been modified since this interview was conducted, so the links do not match the text exactly.
I became involved in EnviroNet in the summer of 1992. Simmons College and the National Science Foundation put together a teacher workshop to introduce telecommunications to science teachers. I learned E-MAIL, I learned the value of the Internet and in 1992 we were state of the art at 2400 baud. We all had little 2400 bauds and could telecommunicate amongst science teachers across New England. Out of that really simple start, EnviroNet evolved into a world renowned environmental network from Simmons College. EnviroNet now is basically funded, one more time, by the National Science Foundation. It's grown into what's know as WhaleNet, which is a monstorous whale monitoring project. What EnviroNet basically offers teachers is a venue for using telecommunications and environmental science on the Internet. This is the EnviroNet home page. If you go through the home page, you basically have a history of the EnviroNet Project, under background in history, or you can look at the EnviroNet monitoring projects themselves. Let me show you some of the environment monitoring projects.
In the first session of EnviroNet, we were primarily Secondary school teachers, but projects were developed and designed and evolved for a great venue of topics and basically for all levels. As you scroll down the EnviroNet monitoring project, there is Acid Rain, which is basically the PH level monitoring project. Bob Burlow out of Gardener basically monitors snow fall and the acid precipitation in snow fall. Bird watch, actually we're going to use in Wachusett district this year. The 1996 EnviroNet team decided that Bird Watch was a nice, simple, Elementary School, maybe K-3 project to get students doing a little environmental monitoring telecommunications. Basically students put up a bird feeder and on select days post the weather conditions and what birds appeared at the bird feeder. That's truly a nice, simple elementary school monitoring project. Plants is run by Gabrielle, she's from Roxbury. It's basically sort of a ethno-botany project on plants. Lichens was our original monitoring project, came out in 1992. It was sort of a nice, simple project where students could collect data on lichens. That's run by Chuck from Lunenberg. Ozone is sort of a Chemistry project. It's run by Michelle. Michelle is from New Hampshire. She was New Hampshire teacher of the year. Presidential award for her Ozone Project.
Some of the Elementary schools have basically put some project or their school on-line. A relatively interesting one that's going to become a virtual nature trail over the next year or so is the Thomas Prince Nature Trail. This is Welcome to the Princeton Nature Trail. This is the idea and pet project of Joanne Blumb, a friend of mine and basically her vision was to make a nature trail behind the school that all the grades and levels and disciplines at Thomas Prince School can actually use.
She's a teacher at the school?
Joanne Blumb teaches Science. She's the 7th and 8th Grade Science Teacher and she got a Sesame Grant to basically establish the Nature Trail. Sesame funded hiring 7th and 8th grade students in the summer to go and lay out the trails, mark the trails, get waivers from the conservation commission to set up the trails. Two summers ago, about 20 students made what is known as the Thomas Prince Nature Trails. On her home page is a map. This is basically the map of the trails. There's a Laurel Trail, Circle Trail, a Vernal Pond Trail, a Brook Trail and a Meadow Trail. The ultimate goal of this particular project is that there will be stops along the trails that are going to be "virtual," that you can look in 360 degrees and see what's in front of you. At the present point and time there basically is the description and some QuickTake pictures.
Let me take you to the Vernal Pond. There's a description of what the Vernal Pond Trail is. Here are some students basically doing an outside activity at the Vernal Pond.
Did the students write the description?
This is a student based project. The trail descriptions are student written. They do that as part of their English assignment. Students are assigned what they're calling the Field Guide. Every student has to do a physical and biological parameter of one of the trails during the course of their 8th grade. Joanne Blumm is establishing a data base of when the first salamander appears, when the pussywillows blossom and basically making a Thomas Prince School Nature Trail.
Are there physical signs on the trail?
Basically the physical signs actually are color coordinated to this map. There's a red trail, a yellow trail, a green trail, and a blue trail. Probably the neatest aspect of the nature trail at Thomas Prince School, is that all the teachers in the building are using it. They use it in the Physical Education Classes, they built snow shoes, the students use it in the winter time to go snow shoeing. They have what is known as the Shepherd's Crook, which is where the English teachers take their students out to do writing. The Art teacher takes them out to do projects. I was pleasantly surprised that all the teachers are actually using Joanne's idea. It's truly an interdisciplinary, across the discipline project.
I'm an advocate of using the Internet in the classroom. It's definitely the wave of the future. I do believe that it's probably as much prep time, using the Internet as it was in I'll say the "old school" of how students do research. You really have to go out and pre-establish that the information is available for your students. In the old school the kids took the books off the library shelf, you had to make sure the books were in the library. There is a lot of prep time for a teacher to make sure that the things that you're having your students look for are available on-line.
Even with all the prep time, do you sometimes run into problems where students can't access sites?
I'll use the Virtual Fly as an example. I was about a week ahead of my colleagues. I had absolutely no problems doing the Virtual Fly Lab. My three classes did it, we all had access, the kids had fun, the really bright students got to be really crazy and do like 9 different traits simultaneously and had some truly mutant looking flies. I raved to my colleagues about what a great idea it was. The day that my colleagues went down to Cal State wasn't up. So he now had a two hour block of time where he could not use the Virtual Fly Lab. He had to punt. He had to become truly creative, because what you had planned on doing is not actually available.
So you need a back-up plan?
You truly need a back-up plan.