Carts in the Hall and Posting in a Learning Management System

Kids in the Hall? No, Carts in the Hall

We finished up our first segment of curriculum and pedagogical chunk of our MAT program…working on carts in the halls. Carts are an assemblage of artifacts or rock samples or minerals from a hall that are setup for interacting with museum visitors. It’s a “please touch” station. We, as MAT students, worked in groups of three on a cart for four hours at a stretch in one of these halls: Gems & Minerals, Mexico & Central America, New York State Environments, African Peoples, and Planet Earth. We did this on seven different days.

This was our first dip into teaching with a museum collection or using informal teaching. We were shown how to use inquiry-based discussion with the visitors…’what do you think it is?...how do you think they would use this?...do you think you might have this in your home?’ so that it was setup as a discussion rather then a one-way stream of us, cart people, feeding answers to them, the museum patrons. This inquiry-based style of teaching reminds me of when I worked at a summer camp the past three summers. Camp kids come in knowing a lot already, you guide them, using their brains, to new places to understand new concepts. It was like that on the carts. But with folks from 3 years old to over seventy. And just like camp, these visitors are there because they want to be. The visitors can leave your cart at any moment or not even come over to your cart. It’s a free choice situation.

One of the great things about this program at this museum is that, because AMNH is a world-renowned natural history museum, people come to visit it from all over the world. On the carts, we got so many vacationers/visitors from everywhere and it challenges a person to try to convey knowledge when there is no common language. This, too, is practice for our school residency and our futures as teachers. A large percentage of students in NYC are not English-language learners.

Carts were fun. Next informal learning session will be with a group teens who are in a summer enrichment program. I do not know exactly what we will be doing with those young people, but I will report back. So far I know we are engaged with a lot of team-teaching experiences. I haven’t had to fly solo yet and I really appreciate that.

So, on to the Learning Management System. I am working towards a teaching credential to teach earth science in the New York state public school system. Our first class in the MAT program has been mostly on-line with a small chunk of face-to-face time. I am not opposed to on-line education but I can pretty much guarantee that I will not be doing any on-line teaching with my students so it’s weird. The LMS is the Moodle platform and, though this installation of Moodle is better than the one I had to use at Bard last semester, it is still a closed system. We’re all doing and saying some interesting things but only the 15 of us plus the 2 (or is it three?) instructors get to see it. I am not a fan of Moodle or the LMS environment and only know from being on the teaching end is that it makes classroom management much easier to ask students to upload their document by X time and date, they get an email confirmation, teacher knows they uploaded it and at what time (is it late?), teacher can see how many posts the student did to the forum, and then teacher can do the grades in Moodle. Ugh. It is pretty clunky. Classroom Management and Learning Management make me cringe.

But the class, even though I’m nagging about it being on-line, has been pretty interesting. I’ve had to be self-directed, but the way the course is set-up, we all can follow paths that we are interested in taking, topics we wish to investigate and write about. Plus some of the assignments have involved visuals like creating graphics and use of Google Maps. The face-to-face aspect of the course is preparation for how we will teach this topic in our future Earth Science classroom.

First month down, 14 more to go!

First Week....Exhausted!

Why am I exhausted?! Because I have built my adult life around the ethos "live close to your work." And, after escaping Los Angeles, I always (but for one brief-ish exception) lived close enough to work or school that I could walk, ride a bike or had a short car drive. I'm not used to this lifestyle! Now, I have a LONG train and subway ride but it's for a duration that I think I can handle, 15 months. But for now, wow, I am a tired woman when I get home to Poughkeepsie. This has been my week at the Museum.

The commute: If I hit it just right, I can make it door-of-my-house to door-of-the-Museum in 2 and a half hours...in the morning. At night, it's longer. Hrumph. But I  have built-in exercise (walking from subway stop to Museum or riding bike from house to Metro North station) so there's that. And that mifi let's me work on the train.

Team Building: Our teacher candidate cohort (that's them above plus a couple of instructors) had an afternoon in Central Park where we worked on learning each other's names and team building. The upshot...we are a team...collaborate! Good to get that out there early because, though I have been out of the being-a-student game for a awhile, I hear that learners these days can get kind of competitive and suffer from grade-anxiety. Plus we got to scramble around Central Park.

Seminars: Over the summer, we will meet with different Museum curators who will give us an exposure to their area of expertise. This week was rocks and minerals. Looking forward to seminars on something I know nothing about like...the solar system!

Laptop: We each got a Mac. We will have to return it at the end of instruction.

Chancellor's Day: A day of NYC science teacher professional development at the Museum that all of we teacher candidates got to participate in.  I got to learn a bit about Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. Also, I heard an interesting panel on encouraging girls to pursue the sciences. What pleased me about the talk and panel was that all teachers were there, male and female. What I found from my technology conference days is that these sorts of gyno-centric panel discussions are mostly women talking to ourselves.

First class - Solar System: This course is a mostly on-line class and the curriculum was developed by geologist Denton Ebel and Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. There is some face-to-face time each week with one of the three faculty members teaching the course. I need it. I know nothing about this topic. See Seminars above.

School visits: Our education involves teaching in in-school residency for the school year and we are visiting the four schools that are part of the MAT program. We visit them all to get a sense of each and then we request the schools for our residency training - a different school for each half of the school year. I saw two schools this past week (one in Yonkers and the other in the Bronx) and I can't tell one from the other in terms of, oh, this one would be way better than that one, so at this point, I'm going to request the schools closest to me to try to reduce my commute. See The commute above.

Circle Line tour: We wrapped up our very full week with a boat trip around Manhattan on the Circle Line. Before heading out, at AMNH we got a brief geologic overview of Manhattan so we had some geomorphic items to keep our eyes open for. The day was stunning. I love viewing Manhattan from this water vantage but what I enjoyed the most was seeing all the bridges.

Week number 2, let's go!

First Day (Back) in Grad School

Up early! Got my new backpack, my Mifi hotspot (Verizon Jetpack) and my monthly Metro-North ticket ready for my first day as a Master of Arts in Teaching student at the American Museum of Natural History.  At this point, I'm planning on taking the train down every day, Monday to Friday, while doing the museum-residency part of my education.

Things We Should Adopt in the U.S. #2

School uniforms. I see them everywhere. On the way to work between 7am and 9am and again when the students get out starting at about 3pm. Girls in their orange dresses, belted at the waist, or blue skirts with Mary Janes, boys in their brown short pants and knee socks, or natty white shirts and ties. Always, the shirts are tucked in. I like this. The debate goes on in the States about school uniforms in public schools but American school kids should wear them. Uniforms level the playing field. Everyone has nothing special and everyone is already special within. When I look out and I see a sea of uniformed Bajan children, I see the future of Barbados. Drivers slow down without School Zone enforcement because these children are the future of the country.

The To-Do List: Preparing to Live Abroad for a Year

My family and I will move to Barbados on September 1 and live there for a year. In order to make this transition smooth, we've kept a running list of things to do on a Google Doc spreadsheet. I've worked with the U.S Embassy in Barbados on some of this, and that has been great. I've also worked with my CIES contact in Washington D.C. and that, too, has been terrific.

Until I start to take my own photos, I'll borrow shots from the internet of where we're headed. This one is from Panoramio and is by Terry Andrews.

Here's a list of some of the more pressing things we've been taking care of in the past weeks:

Vehicle - To take a car or to not take a car. Shipping our vehicle seemed to be an option for a moment and we even fantasized about bringing the kayaks and bikes. However, the more we delved into the matter, the more it seemed cost prohibitive and/or impossible. There is an age restriction of four years for cars imported into Barbados. Ours is ten years old. The other issue would be duties. I never got a really solid answer, but it may be as much as 61 percent of the value of the vehicle. Here is the page that I went by.

What we will do for a car is rent one long-term. I got the name of a mechanic who does this through the person at the UWI that I am working with.

School for the kids - Public vs. Private. We decided on a private school option, the Learning Solutions campus. School will start right away for the children. They are mixed between excited and dread but mostly they are filled with happy anticipation.

Place to live - If you're going all the way to paradise, might as well try to be near the water. As I reported before, we went to Barbados and looked at a bunch of housing options. We settled on one that we love and got that all taken care of. It was very easy to find housing on-line. There were photos, email addresses and phone numbers.

Clothes and shoes - The average temperature is 85° F. We will want to have light clothing but not too casual. The kids will need school clothes. We are buying Keens, sun protection shirts, and shorts (not cargo shorts). When we visited in May, we saw a notice at the airport that there was a restriction on wearing camouflage attire. We will not bring any camo.

Airline tickets and luggage - We got our airline tickets on American Airlines. Jet Blue has a very low fare from JFK to Barbados but it does not start until October 1. As for the luggage, we can bring only two checked bags and one carry-on with us. Checked bags can weigh up to 50 pounds, carry-on can be 40 pounds. We will need to be frugal and conscientious with what we decide to bring.

Diplomatic pouch - We sent four boxes of books and articles via the Fulbright diplomatic pouch. Each weighed 50 pounds and the cost was about $80 total. These boxes get sent by 'media rate' to Washington D.C. and then are forwarded to the U.S. Embassy in Barbados. Utilizing this benefit was important given the weight restrictions on our flight. This shipment was done three weeks before departure.

Phone calls - We will suspend our U.S. cell phone numbers but keep our land-line operating with a message to call our Skype number (same area code). After a paid for the Skype number for a year ($60) I heard about MagicJack, a device that allows you to make calls from your PC through the internet ... for free. Sounds too good to be true so I will need to check this out and report back. The Magicjack costs $39 which includes the first year's service cost. The next year will cost $19. When we get to Barbados, we'll get cell phones.

Visa and passport - We all have passports but we all need to get a visa. This should not be a problem we just need to bring five passport photos of ourselves, a birth certificate, and the kid's vaccination records. I have a working visa while in Barbados.

Medical insurance - I get extra medical coverage through the Fulbright. The family needed to get extra coverage for international travel and emergency medical evacuation coverage.

Miscellaneous items - software for the kids, renting the house, storing the cars(s) and removing the license plate, finding temporary homes for the pets, finding a gardener to keep up the lawn and clean the leaves, buy snorkel gear, new (sun) glasses prescription, medical and dental appointments, hair cuts, and on and on.

This last shot is also from Panoramio and is by jamesbell07. It clarifies the reason for the SPF shirts, snorkel gear and flotation devices. And sun screen.