Energy Conservation Project Continued

What I Learned from a Crate of Plastic Bottles

Our planet is currently facing an environmental and ecological crisis. Authorities and scientists argue about the causes, extent, and need for urgency in remediating the damage. There are some absolutes, however, and one of those, American consumption of plastic bottles, is what I am concerning my project with.

I chose to study how much landfill space our classroom could save if we simply recycled plastic bottles. View my PowerPoint here. The project was a success in many regards; it taught me ways to extrapolate data, and how to present those findings in a graphic, non numerical manner. I also learned about the power of my assumptions. In this project, I used the assumption that the bottles would not be crushed down at the dump, which had huge implications for how much space they would occupy. I also assumed, in my extrapolations, that each classroom would produce as many bottles as ours, which I know is a poor assumption because we have more students in our five classes than any other teacher in the school. I also assumed that each large high school in the ASD would produce as many bottles as our school, which may also be inaccurate, because we only have around 840 students at ERHS, while many other schools have close to 2,000. View my first Excel Spreadsheet here. (Created 10.22)

View my fumbling video here.

Wow. Watching myself give a presentation is painful. I appear to have some type of spastic muscle disorder in which my hands constantly flail around and a speech disorder in which I tend to repeat the words "um" and "like" (the latter I am especially embarrassed about). I never had realized how much I tend to use "fillers" as well...repeating myself when I'm looking for words, for example. I made a mistake in which I read 100,000 as "10,000", which is silly. But the thing that I am most embarrassed about is how much my lack of enthusiasm for this subject came through. I love talking about environmental issues, and trying to convince others of the gravity of the situation. After watching myself, I'm not jazzed to recycle. This is sad...I hope this is not always how my lectures to the classes are....
But on the brighter side, I think my voice was clear and not too loud or soft. And heck, the powerpoint sure showed up well.

I do feel like my project has made a difference, however. Not especially in regards to my own consumption habits; I have always recycled plastics 1, 2, aluminum, paper, and tin, but for my students. I purposely gave my presentation to two of our classes three weeks before the project was due, in order to compare how many bottles were recycled before and after I talked to the students about the value of sustainability. View my second Excel Spreadsheet here. (11.13) There was a considerable increase in the average amount of bottles recycled in our classroom after I gave those talks.

This project taught me a lot of things, foremost among those, is patience. I had to have patience with the video camera, slow computers, and mostly, helping to alter and encourage my students to care enough to toss their plastic into the recycling crate. I have always been frustrated by people who throw recyclable materials away when a recycling bin is right next to the trashcan, so in someways, I need to control my frustration and learn to be patient and helpful.

On an inspiring note, I also realized the impact I can have to motivate a group of students to help conserve and think about their actions, and the possible long term affects of that little group of students if they could touch their entire school, and district, and state, and nation, and world......

Article Assement Three - Tools for the Mind

Overview

Mary Burns, a Senior Technology and Professional Development Specialist from Newton, MA wrote an article titled Tools for the Mind for Educational Leadership magazine. In it, Ms. Burns argues that technology has been put on the back burner in many schools across America, mostly due to a lack of infrastructural supports, teacher training, and inaccessibility.
Technology that is used in the classroom is often that of lower order thinking skills, such as creating visuals or cutting and pasting information. A decade and half ago schools and educators were excited about the prospects of technology integration to broaden students horizons, reach higher order thinking skills, and communicate and contribute to international discussions and forums. Today virtually none of these goals have been reached, and Ms. Burns offers suggestions of how to turn the tide.

Reference Points

1. In the 1990’s the potential for instructional technology was seen as a boundless horizon for increasing student learning and developmental cognitive processes.
2. Today however, we lack the funding for training, technology equipment, or research which links technology to student improvement, and hence it’s potential is lagging.
3. Districts focus on teaching teachers the skills to use technology and not how to apply that to higher order thinking.
4. There is an over reliance on visually stimulating or simple software, such as PowerPoint and Word.
5. Classrooms rarely use higher order applications such as spreadsheets, GIS, internet search tools, or databases.
6. Students approach the information they find on the internet in a passive manner, neither questing nor seeking to validate the information.
7. Students need to learn to use technology to create, analyze, and reconstruct what information they know and have to reach deeper levels of understanding.
8. Teachers need more time and funding for professional development to help their students with these tools and to create educational technology leadership.
9. We need to stop focusing on the tools we have, and instead focus on how those tools can help our students.
10. Technology should be approached with the product of what we want our students to learn in mind, and use the tools to build up that that goal.

Reflection

Wow. Yes, I often feel exactly as Mary Burns does about technology. That the tools are phenomenal but our ability to use them is not. I recently showed some amazing time lapse GIS data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The images illustrated the melting of ice over Greenland since the 1960’s. I tried for a long time to explain what we were looking at, but the power of the images was lost on the students. They couldn’t comprehend how those data sets were tied together, and how much work it must have taken to do so. I’m tempted and inspired to have them build a similar scenario, but baffled by how to do so. Do we even have that type of software in the schools? Am I qualified to pull that off? If the students have questions, will I be able to help them?

But the potential is there. A colleague of mine raved about how useful using CBL’s to graph data were, because they showed in real time how graphs were formed using actual data, not just some abstract numbers from a book. But do all teachers have access to the technology? I recently tried to arrange the laptop cart for a lesson on cell organelles, but found they were booked for the next two weeks that period by an English teacher, using them to write essays on Word. Here’s my suggestion, make every other week each teacher in the school has a scheduled computer lab day, and teachers can trade or swap if need be.

Ah, and the dreaded PowerPoint. I remember seeing an article in the paper about 5 years ago, when a teacher used PP to show that
-I hate it.
-I hate it.
-I hate it.
It reduces our knowledge to fragments, and hones our artistic instead of cognitive skills.

But why do science teachers get the brunt of this workload? The examples Ms. Burn’s used were all from science (short of one linear algebra example). Teachers need more time for a lot of things, and one of them is collaboration. Schools have a lot of work ahead of them technologically; to integrate, develop, and promote technology are among the top priorities. It’s a tall order, but if we continue to keep our technology expansion with higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind, we can move mountains.

Energy Conservation Project Overview

There is a plastics scourge on our planet today.

Unlike glass or paper, it is not made of natural or renewable resources. Instead, plastics come from polymers of petrochemicals, or oil (www.priweb.org). In modern times, plastics make up huge amounts of consumer products…from rugs to furniture. Even our most vital resource, water, now comes to much of the American population through small, individually packaged, plastic bottles.

In an average class at Eagle River High School, I can look out over the audience and see one or two aluminum cans and four or more plastic bottles. Everyday, those large amounts of drink containers fill up our plastic trashbags and are hauled to the landfill, where they take decades to break down and fill up space. How much trash could my classroom prevent from being taken to the landfill every week if we instead recycle our plastic bottles?

There is a lot of information on the topic of plastics recycling (wikipedia ‘plastic recycling’ and their long page further gives you nine outstanding links as well). It is also a politically charged issue that has links to both large businesses (including Exxon) and grass roots environmentalism. The topic can spur into plastic bags, aluminum recycling, relative costs of transporting materials and much more. My challenge will be to keep it succinct and simple, and to remain objective.

I will collect data by counting the number of milk crates (900 cm3) of plastic bottles I take to the recycle center each week from my classroom.