Polar Profiles

Overview

Students will develop an understanding of what it takes to interview scientists, and take the corresponding data and reformat it into an electronic medium.

Objective

Students will be able to write questions to scientists in the field, interview, take the data collected, and convert to an electronic format including MP3 clips and post to the Internet.

Preparation

Students can become familiar with the PolarTREC website (www.polartrec.com) in order to contact interested scientists undertaking research at both poles.

Procedure

DAY ONE: Introduction to writing interview questions. Students will choose scientists, do Internet research as to the focus of their scientific study and then develop a series of questions designed to share information about their scientific careers in the polar regions (one hour).

DAY TWO: Students conduct phone interviews with participating scientists. All interviews are digitally recorded as well as manually written by the pairs of students (one hour).

DAY THREE: Students put digital voice recording on the computers, listen to the recording and take more detailed notes to summarize pertinent facts (forty-five minutes).

DAY FOUR: Students choose a section of the digital recording to edit and use as an MP3 clip for inclusion on a web page (at least one hour). This could turn out to be a two day lesson.

DAY FIVE: Students take the clips taken from the digital recordings as well as written notes and re-write their polar profiles for submission to a web page.

Resources

PolarTREC website for contacting interested researchers: www.polartrec.com

Assessment

• Final test on making an edited MP3 audio clip.
• Final interviews graded through the six traits writing program.
• Student journal through the entire lesson.

Credits

Jillian Worssam, jworssam [at] earthlink.net