Another update: Saturday, November 10th, 2012

Update! Just this week I went to the EdTech Teacher iPad Summit at Harvard Med School. After two days surrounded by people immensely excited by how iPads (and other handheld devices) can and will change the face of education, I felt it was time to not just update my RET blog but to start another (which ps, I wouldn't have felt so comfortable with if I hadn't spent time this summer on the RET blog)!

 Below is more-or-less the same post I put as my first post in the new blog: http://sgiglioscience.blogspot.com/.

So, my Anatomy class will be getting iPads to use 24 hrs a day starting second semester and in preparation for that I am trying to use the communal iPad cart our school has as often as I can get my hands on it (which isn't all that often since I work with lots of other motivated and creative people also using the cart) and working closely with the other 5 teachers and memebers of the tech department involved in the pilot. We meet weekly, give each other ideas, and generally talk, blog, email, and google-doc our experiences. 

Anyway after two days at the conference two themes in particular hit home: 

1) We need more time to do this well. Particularly time to play with it and get crazy new ideas and to share apps and ideas with each other. It seems a lot of administrators at the conference think teachers are resisting the iPad idea because they are stodgy or uncreative or afraid of losing control. In talking to teachers however, the problem seems to be more of one of time and support. Saying 'we support you with the iPad" is one thing. Devoting paid time to play with apps, develop new ideas, practice is another. 

2) The SAMR model: 

http://jennyluca.wikispaces.com/TPACK+and+SAMR

This basically said that iPads can be introduced into the classroom in many ways. The least helpful way (and most annoying way in my opinion) is just to replace things. In some cases to replace things that already work or we already do well (i.e. take notes on this app instead of on paper - this hasn’t worked well in chemistry so far). Although this can be fun and it can reduce paper, this is not the best way to use the iPad. The real goal is to use iPads to do things we’ve never been able to do or maybe never even thought of before. I spent most of the conference taking notes on ideas I am developing rather than on just what the presenters were saying. Now I just need the time to further explore my ideas, watch videos on line, read blogs, and figure out how to make them happen!!

The best session I attended at the conference was by 4 women from NTA, all of whom are actively, currently teaching in the classroom (which, unfortunately is not who usually runs professional development sessions). These four teachers from Chicago all used the iPad in different ways. They discussed real ideas that are actually manageable and I felt could be transformative as well. Over the course of this year I hope to update this blog with some of the ideas that I 'stole' and worked with to implement in my classroom - as well as the ideas of my own that have springboarded from what I've learned. In the meantime, check out the blog of Jenni Magiera: http://teachinglikeits2999.blogspot.com My fellow teacher Elizabeth showed this blog to me today and we realized it was one of these amazing presenters.  

Ok -well this is a start. Until I actually have another free minute to write - have fun!

Months later..... Nov 6th, election day - 2012

As soon as the school year started life got so busy I forgot to update this blog! So here's an update on how the RET experience this summer has influenced my school year.

First of all I can't stop talking about my summer experience - to other teachers, to students, to my department head, to my friends, to everyone!

I have brought my poster to school and walked a lot of people through the research I did.

More than just talk, I have started long discussions with my classes as to what a career in research looks like. What would their day to day be like. What sort of support would they have (a research team), what challenges they might face (unexpected results, no results), what success might look like (new technologies, presented papers).

With my seniors we have talked a lot about universities that are also research institutions (like BU). One thing I learned from all of the graduate, undergraduate, and post-grad students I worked with this summer, is that is was really important for them to seek out research opportunities and connections on their own. No one will come to them at the end of a class and say 'you should join this research team' - they will have to seek out opportunities.

Aside from just enthusiasm and conversation, my involvement in the technology at the school has magnified. Our school is adopting a 1:1 iPad initiative for all our students starting Sept 2013. In the meantime I have become one of only 6 iPad Pilot teachers at the Prep. This means that I will give my students iPads for them to use 24 hrs a day, I attend weekly meetings where all the iPad teachers and a representative from our tech department discuss our successes, failures, research, and new ideas, and I engage in many online and email discussions of current literature examining iPads as a learning tool. o

Although my students don't have their iPads yet (we are looking at January), a few of the other pilot teachers are up and running. Spending this much time discussing the future of technology as a teaching tool has been exciting, daunting, and given me a huge number of ideas. For one, I have finally ordered my RET classroom supplies. Since all of the students will have iPad soon I have convinced the science department head to order the vernier software for all of the iPads going out to science students. (Gary Smith who many of you know b/c he was an RET a few years back is my department head - which, by the way, means he was REALLY easy to convince/was already planning to do it). I also used the RET funding to purchase two Spectrometers for the vernier system. They will allow students to not just look at emission spectrum with the handheld prism spectrometers, but allow them to use these sensors and have an emission spectrum appear on their devices! The software also allows for a great analysis into the Ryburg equation and Lyman series. I still have work to do to develop a solid lesson (my lesson plan that I wrote this summer needs some tweaking for real life), but I am really excited to use the spectrometers, vernier, and the ipads all together in my chemistry classes!

Here's the only problem - we just learned about Bohr, hydrogen and emission spectrum last week. We didn't have the ipads or new probes yet, so we did it with the older spectrometers. I will say my new knowledge of photonics allowed me to connect this entire experiment to the idea of measuring the unseen with light we can see (or sense) and what I did in the lab this summer imaging viruses. That added an entirely new depth to the conversation. I may not be able to use my new technological tools and toys until next fall, but in the meantime I am doing a better job with the tools I have. (With the exception of a broken nitrogen gas tube.)

Come to think of it - I wish I had taken pictures of the whole activity since a blog with no pictures is pretty boring.

Oh well! So I'm off to a good start. See you next time.
Mrs. G

Week 5 - Friday August 3rd, 2012 - Research

This week in our blog we were asked to answer three questions.

1) How has this experience changed your perspective of research?

Honestly, research is a lot like I remember it from when I worked in a lab years ago. The overall idea is amazingly interesting, and the work itself is slow and a bit monotonous. I am so impressed by the researchers in our lab who pull intensely long hours and run trial after trial perfecting their protocols, and spend hour upon hour on computers analyzing data.

2) How has it impacted your idea of your own competence in research?

As I said, the amount of time spent sitting and analyzing data can be overwhelming. I can do it - but I found myself getting antsy and cranky very easily. Anyone that has spent time with me as a teacher knows I have a LOT of energy to expend. I missed running around the classroom and interacting with hundreds of people a day.

Although research is a group experience, nothing compares to teaching over 100 high school students on any given day!

3) How do you envision changes in your own classroom as a result of this experience.

I will be making sure they are much more meticulous during lab experiments. They tend to speed through things and they often have no idea how important it is to take solid, legible notes.

I also cannot wait to impart on them how everything they are learning in chemistry (significant figures, algebra, scientific notation, solutions, dilutions, measuring skills, unit conversion and dimensional analysis, the metric system, logs, etc.) are absolute necessities to surviving in the scientific community. I have said it all along, but I now have more evidence to back it up!

Week 5 - Friday August 3rd, 2012 - My RET Website

This week we had to create a website for our RET experience.

Here's a link to mine:
https://sites.google.com/site/mrsgiglioretsite/

Week 4 - Thursday July 26th, 2012 - The Clean Room

This Tuesday and last all of the RETs had time in the clean room! Below you see Valerie and I in our bunny suits. We have to wear these to protect the products we are making and using in the cleanroom. With the suits on it is very unlikely any skin or hair or other debris will fall from our bodies onto what we are working with!

We are taking the large silicon wafers seen below and eventually turning them into chips with some Prep school spirit on them!

The schematic to the right explains what we have done to the wafer. Read the schematic top down. First we applied photoresist. Then we placed a mask (essentially a stencil with my Prep pride) on the wafer and irradiated it with UV light. The light broke down the photoresist that was not blocked by the stencil, thus putting my design onto the wafer.  The next week we did deposition (the machine below does this step). In deposition we deposit titanium and then gold on top of our wafer. This seems to wipe out our design but after a dip in an acetone bath and shaker, the gold brushes off the unexposed area - leaving our original design.      Next week you will see the final product - for now I need to go back to analyzing data in MatLab. 

Week 3 - Friday July 20th, 2012 - The Full Length Feature Film

And now... the full length feature film you've all been waiting for......

                      The RET Experience!!!
                                                by Stephanie Giglio and Valerie Ordway

                                      

As it turns out, our lab made a professional film of their own recently. To see their film, done for the Journal of Visualized Experiments, click on this --> Click here for a Video Publication from our lab!

Week 3 - Tuesday July 17th, 2012 - the Trailer!

So... by the end of the week Valerie and I will have a video out that will explain and demonstrate some of the AWESOME SCIENCE we are doing every day.... Here's a little trailer for you....

Week 2 - Friday July 13th, 2012 - Headway on our Expt!

It's Friday the 13th and today our pedagogy meeting was canceled so Valerie and I headed back to the lab and finally started making some real headway!

It's about time I give you an overview on what we are doing.

Our lab has developed a machine, the IRIS, that shots a ray of LED light at a very small nano-chip. By comparing the way the light bounces off of the chip both before and after a substance has been adhered to the chip - we can determine how much of this substance is present. The idea is in the near future, to be able to put a drop of blood on a chip coated with anitbodies for different viruses. If the blood has any of the viruses, it will adhere to the antibody for that virus and change the interference pattern of the LED light.  The IRIS can analyze this change and therefore run a test that could diagnose a patient with any number of viruses at once.

Currently, Valerie and I are working at finding an antibody we can place on the chip that will adequately capture the H1N1 flu virus. We spent several days doing online and telephone research and leg-work to find an antibody that looks promising and has been testing in similar experiments to ours (antibodies cost $500 for a VERY TINY amount so we can't just test them willy-nilly). While we are waiting for the antibodies we finally ordered to come in, we decided to test an antibody George already had.

We purified the antibody George had on-hand and spotted it on the chip. Then after a pre-wash, wash, and block we added the flu virus! Here is a picture of our chip incubating in the H1N1 virus (we're hoping this virus will stick to the antibody we added earlier).

To test if this antibody works to actually catches the flu we imaged the chip with the antibody pre-virus (a control) and then the chip with the antibody after the viral incubation. We will compare these images and analyze this data next week, at which point I will be able to tell you then more about how we will measure our results.  If this antibody doesn't succeed we will try again with the ones we ordered online!

To the right is a picture of the low-mag IRIS we used to take images of the chip. And below(the green image) is a post-scan we took after the viral incubation.




As the summer progresses our work will broaden. Once we find an antibody that works to capture H1N1 (if we find an antibody that works!) we will analyze data both with a high-mag single particle IRIS and with a new, more user-friendly, NSF-AIR. If we are getting consistent results from both we will help the lab provide evidence that the NSF-AIR machine is a reliable way to gather data. I will write much more about this process when we get there!

See the barely there blurry little circles? Those are our spots - this is where we put the antibody. I can't tell yet if virus actually adhered yet - but we will learn this next week so I will keep you updated!!!

Now it's time to start my weekend! 

Week 2 - Thursday July 12th, 2012 - The people I spend my day with!

Valerie sitting in our usual spot outside the lab!

One of the best parts of this RET program is meeting so many new people. To the right is Valerie! She is my partner and a middle school teacher in Sharon with a LOT of teaching experience. Valerie has been an excellent person to spend my day with - she is thoughtful and meticulous and has great ideas for how to make science more accessible to students.

Valerie and George

  Behind Valerie to the left is George. George is our go-to-guy. He is a graduate student at BU who also received his undergrad degree here. He is teaching Valerie and I how to do all of the lab protocols we are working on (I will go into more detail on this in a later post). George is very hard-working and currently involved in a number of different projects, but makes time to show us what he's up to. He even took us down to the clean-room the other day (more on that later).

Carlos

On the right is Carlos - Carlos is a post-doc who has spent a lot of time showing Valerie and I the ropes. He's friendly and dedicated and pretty much runs the labs - or so it seems so far!!!

In this picture he is sitting at the single particle detector that we have recently learned how to use. I will include more details and pictures of this in a later post as well!




Oh, I suppose I should include a picture of myself... Well here I am - working on this blog!

Week 2 - Thursday July 12th, 2012 - The Lab Meeting...

This Wednesday, Valerie and I were able to sit in on our lab's weekly LAB MEETING - during this meeting lab business (who broke what, what needs to be replaced, who is coordinating the lab outing) is discussed, and one member of the lab does a PowerPoint presentation about how her research is currently going.

Since each member of the lab is working on different projects, the presenter must provide background and technical knowledge to the crowd, explain what has lead to where she is now, what roadblocks she is still encountering in her research, and what she plans to do next. Not only is the lab member presenting this material, she then is peppered with questions from the rest of the lab about why she did this or didn't do that. 

This entire meeting was a great learning opportunity for me both as a researcher and as a teacher. First of al,l it filled in some of the pieces of technical understanding I was missing. Secondly, it emphasized the importance of presentation skills! In high school science classes this skill is mostly overlooked. I do some presentation work with my seniors, but this made me want to do more and come up with different, some more formal, some more informal options for presenting work. I would also love to find a way to bring this into my sophomore Chem I classes. 

On a related note, our brown bag lunch talk this week with Prof. Ruane was mainly about the publish or perish cycle of how to get research communicated. He discussed the large number of ways communication occurs in the scientific community. From this lecture I am going to try to come up with more ways my students can learn to communicate what they are learning. From 2 paragraph "letters" they could write at the end of class to get the buzz out there right away about what they learned that day, to written "journal article" lab reports that take some time to produce I hope to find more ways to fold this aspect of science, scientific communication, into my classroom.

Week 1 - Friday July 6th, 2012 - Back in Lab

One week into the RET.....

When I left college I thought I was going to be a research scientist. I had worked in a lab throughout college and had signed on to continue full-time. Two years of pipetting very small amounts of liquid later, I accidentally ended up teaching HS science instead. 

Teaching is incredible - but I've always missed the laboratory atmosphere and the intellectual acuity of everyone working so hard to discover things that never been explored before.

The Research Experience for Teachers program has given me a chance to go back to the lab - and boy has it been a strange experience this week.

First of all the acronyms are overwhelming - and I knew some of them coming in! I am in the RET (Research Experience for Teachers) program at BU (Boston University) in the OCN (Optical Characterization and Nanophotonics) lab working with the IRIS (Interferometric Reflectance Imaging System) to image the hopeful capture of the N1N1 virus. Thankfully, I seem to be accessing a part of my brain that has been dormant for years and I recognize a lot of the acutal reagents we are using during the wet work.


The labs we are working in are a little small and crowded but loaded with awesome exciting equipment. The IRIS which the lab is busy developing is the main piece of equipment I've used. There are 3 different iterations of the machine in the lab right now (a high mag, low mag, and new more portable version). All three of these use LEDs which are much safer and more inexpensive than earlier versions which used lasers. But don't worry - there are still lasers and laser curtains throughout the entire lab.


We have not been invited into the lab workspace very often so have only really spoken with the two people we are working with, a post-grad Carlos, and a grad student, George. They have been very helpful and I have been peppering them with questions about their academic and career backgrounds and how they like being research scientists.


The project I am working on mainly involves finding an antibody we can attach to our chip which will most effectively capture the flu virus (A/PR/8/34) we want to detect. We are learning lab protocol involved in spotting the Ab on the plate, blocking, washing, and imaging the plates using the IRIS, incubating with virus, and then imaging again. Finally I hope to learn how to analyze the data as well.

Overall - a good first week. I really hope I get to spend more and more time in the lab as the summer progresses!