Let's Go Live!
PolarTREC Teacher Alex Eilers hosts a LIVE PolarConnect Event from Antarctica with over 3,000 students watching! How cool is that?
What better way to return from PolarTREC Teacher Orientation 2012 than to jump right into a PolarConnect Event? 3,000 students, 100 people, and a research team in Antarctica! It was exciting to also share the link on Twitter and Google +, and preparing your class for live events is so important. I usually prep students with a homework question the night before that they can either ask outloud or in the chatbox, or we vote for our favorite to be asked by our class. I love how the team posted links to the Ask the Team Forums for any unanswered questions! Alex and her team had beautiful slides with up-close rich pictures of the seals and the equipment they used and diagrams, and they seamlessly answered questions in the chat box while Janet and Sarah did a great job moderating! The Live Events are so engaging, and you can really tell when you hear students patch in from their classrooms-- there simply is nothing cooler than knowing that right this second, you are connected live with someone in the Arctic! As I plan for my trip, where I will mostly be remote, I look forward to seeing how we can utilize this great technology before and after our trip with the Research Team.
Great Preparations
As a PolarTREC Teacher finished with Orientation, I now get to do all of the planning, including looking at the needs of students, communicating with my research team, and creating an outreach plan. I'm excited to start researching all about Early Human Civilization before my trek in July in Alaska, and my Researcher, Dr. Jeff Rasic of the National Park Service, has given me some lovely materials to delve into. Luckily, many of them are in Google Book format, so I can peruse online at my leisure first, and students can use them for easy research with Control+ F to find key words!
*Human Ecology of Beringia *First Peoples in a New World
I also got access to some awesome podcasts and videos already made to start "Uncovering a PaeloEskimo Camp!". I'm super-excited to start planning fun activities to help students understand this very interesting find!
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