sandcastle

This edublogging caper is fantastic! I was introduced to the blogosphere serendipitously at the confluence of a set of otherwise mutually exclusive factors. These included the need to set up a web page to mount artwork for posting at Illustration Friday, the commencement of an alternative and rather innovative annual professional appraisal for our teaching staff, and the beginning of a new topic in Year 8 Science. I attended a teacher PD offered by one of our own staff, Jo McLeay at just the right moment in time. At the end of the PD I was equipped to do all three. But it didn’t end there. I keep finding new and creative ideas offered by innovative, enlightened and passionate teachers who are happy and keen to share their experiences and excitement.

So now we’re starting Ecology. I had already planned how to run this, using our own school grounds as a resource and focal point for examining a local ecosystem, considering biotic and abiotic factors and tracking change. Then I found Amy Rogers while browsing through Edublogs.

Everything changed!

Amy Rogers is a teacher working in the United Kingdom, who is planning a research trip to Antarctica. Her blog is full of discovery and fun for students and teachers alike. Not only is she going to Antarctica, but she has had the foresight and generosity to invite students around the globe to take the journey with her, albeit in virtual mode! And she has challenged students to come up with questions and experiments that she can undertake while there. What a great way to engage us all! So that’s what we’ve been doing! We started this unit on Ecology by considering the Antarctic environment first - we began by building a profile of what we imagine Antarctica to be like… just  impressions at first… cold, icy, very cold, desolate, penguins… that was about it at first! Then we took a virtual tour to the continent, taking in photographic galleries of bird species, penguin species, whales, seals, ice and volcanoes. This generated a plethora of questions… some brilliant!

And that’s where we’re up to.

Next we’ll sort and prioritise our questions before selecting one to translate into a formal investigation. Then we’ll send it off to Amy Rogers… and maybe we’ll be seeing our experiment actually happening in Antarctica!                                                                                    

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