23 January 2013 Making Friends- Networking: Meet John C

I hope the day will be a lighter highway
For friends are found on every road
Can you ever think of any better way
For the lost and weary travelers to go?

Making friends for the world to see
Let the people know you got what you need
With a friend at hand you will see the light
If your friends are there, then everything's all right
Thanks Elton John and Bernie Taupin

Last night was the second night for the poster sessions. As part of my students homework assignment they needed to collect at leas two reduced sized posters and interview the scientists about their work. It was great fun watching kids get really excited about talking to different scientists and learn a deeper bit about Arctic Research. Many were coming back to me to give me full verbal reports on what they learned.

One poster that I found super interesting is called the “3 Amigos Project”. Truth be told Anna’s mom, Fran Hayden found the poster very eye catching and interesting and sent us to visit it. The poster reflected information collected over many years dealing with mussels, barnacles and rockweed. They observe the “amount “ of organisms” on a given rock or space by taking photos of it over long periods of time. Then they analyze the photos. It is so easy to do that Anna was able to look at the photo and tell the scientist, John Harper, that she saw about 25% of mussels on a given rock and then we looked at his graph to find that she was right on! This will be a great idea for a project in our Mangrove Park back in Florida.

This is their website address http://www.coastalandoceans.com/3amigos.html

And they also have a FaceBook page where you too can send in your observations or simply “like them”. http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-3-Amigos-Project/306105852776380

Meet John

I am John C from St. Mark Catholic School in Florida. Monday, January 21, 2013 was the first day of the Alaska Marine Science Symposium. We heard three people speak at the COSEE, Center for Ocean Science Excellence in Education, www.coseealaska.net/ workshop called Communicating Science. All of the speakers were talking about connecting science. They all had a different way of doing it though. One did it through radio, another did it by posting pictures and videos on the web, two did it by writing journals or books. After the speakers shared their knowledge, we were able to go in small groups, to two speakers that interested us. They shared a few more details, would answers questions and we did did activities. For the radio group we interviewed a person and made “30 second sound bites” about the person.

http://youtu.be/Oujfv6fhbVY

That night we went to the Egan Center. Here we presented our poster, The Benefits of being a SoTRE, Students of a teacher researcher experiences, and looked at other posters. We learned from many people about the different sciences. Many asked "Why did you guys leave the warm weather for this?"
-John C

Trail Magic is a term I learned back when I hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail. It simply implies that something GREAT and out of the ORDINARY occurred. This happened last night.

Fund raising can always be tedious and hit many dead ends. In this case a gentleman from a company that we had requested funds for had emailed me back and forth a few times, in the end he could not find a way for the company he worked for to support our group. We did not meet the criteria. He, Scott Pegau, our angel, tracked me down and opened his wallet. NOW THAT IS TRAIL MAGIC!