Following is an outline resource used to describe the evolution of the turbine page. What is described is the meandering constructivist effort of one science teacher to make a thought provoking resource for using in his physics class. The photograph and video was while on an afternoon walk with the family.
This video and other images were taken first of all simply because they were of an interesting nature. The thing about photographs and videos is that their is always a story behind them. With a story, one can always come up with questions based on observations ... at least for a science teacher this is a relatively simple thing to conclude.
From a curricular point of view, photographs and videos of nature provides an authentic perspective in terms of questioning. It seems students need to be given the opportunity to synthesis their own questions based on observations.
With this perspective any multimedia source taken of nature, lab setup in class, student collected data, data table in Excel, sound files, and so on could be of great value for another science teacher. Even if I, at the moment, don't have a clue. With this in mind I did the following:
Like many of us that have a digital camera can do, I downloaded to my images and video to my computer. Processed them exporting the video (mov file) to a web friendly version and uploaded to the Physics folder.
Initially I was not really sure what to do. I first made used of the Web Page resource on the site to "display" the video with the notion to prompt students to think about what they are seeing. I also thought about adding Google Local map code to tie the video to a place just to add additional opportunities for students to generate more questions.
I played around with it over a couple days and realized there was a smarter way to go. Didn't think about using the Location resources instead. Would have saved some time.
The location resource lets one put in their lat/long coordinates and it will generate the map for them. I used Google Earth to get the location and then entered it into the location resource. See link above.
In playing around with Google Earth to get the location of the farm pond where I took the photographs, I decided to go ahead and make a kmz file. With this I added more directed questions for students to play with. I attached this file to the Location resource. See link above.
I understand that this version is not quick "perfect" but the notion is that it is a nugget in the rough. Teachers may think of changing the direction of the Turbine Location resource. Teachers from Altus, Ok or even Colorado Springs just might finish it off for me.
Consider this ... the science teacher at Fort Supply just might have several questions in mind already that could push this notion of a curricular nugget into a self contain website with online assessments and on and on it could go. All of this and more is possible on the Science Collaborative.
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