First thing this morning was a reassurance of that feeling when Carol popped in my room before class. We began bouncing ideas of implementing the lesson “Black Sea Bass Encounter” and the cross-curricular opportunities. It was followed up with Mike (Griffin) and I meeting up in our Ocean Science room, where I filled him in on Dr. Jensen’s lecture and the potential collaboration.

The ever-pressing issue is continuing that “buzz” or motivation. How do we do this? What needs to be put in place? How do we sustain M.A.R.E.? I think last nights “experimental” lecture was a wonderful starting point. It makes sense to teach M.A.R.E. to educators the same way we would teach our students… small chunks of information. I have this moto I use in my Art class, “A little bit of information, a lot of application”.

To be able to process small amounts of information at a given time takes a lot of the intimidation our of teaching or implementing M.A.R.E. Last night was the perfect example. We talked about fisheries and the lesson was relevant to what we just learned, but that’s as far as it went, which allowed us to process and make sense of the information. We always have to remember that an abundance of our M.A.R.E. educators are not scientists and the language alone can be consuming and overwhelming.

I would like to see the M.A.R.E. educator nights happen bi-monthly. It would give us a month in between lectures to implement what we learned/ talked about and it would give us time to come back with “real” feedback.

I’m not sure if this is the place for what I just wrote, but I figured someone would read it. Thanks again for the opportunity.

The second options is to attend the follow-up webinars to the workshop. The schedule for these webinars can be found in the workshop agenda that is linked in the announcement above. The dates and information are listed following the Feb. 19th schedule.

Hope that you can participate in one of these options,
Carrie

One question and a suggestion: regarding Ocean Literacy, how will the presenter or the participant assess his/her level of understanding? How do you know what has been learned? If you are interested in developing assessments or opportunities for students to demonstrate what they have learned, I would be happy to collaborate with you to integrate this presentation with my “Everyone Can Write About….” curriculum which is proven to increase mastery test scores for written expression. As we know, high stakes tests (including science) often have a written component, but there are no national standards for writing. States’ standards differ. ECWA is a flexible, easy, fun and proven method.

Then, once you have the file on your machine, I find that you can often just drag the file over your web browser window to view it. (I know in Safari, sometimes you have to drag it over the address bar to get it to work.) You could also try File->Open in your browser.

Hope this helps!