The information and instructions are on the NABT website at http://www.nabt.org/websites/institution/index.php?p=492.

Biology Educator Leadership Scholarship (BELS)

The Biology Educator Leadership Scholarship (BELS) program was established to encourage and support teachers who want to further their education in the life sciences or life science education. The award recipient is required to be a practicing educator who is also enrolled (or anticipates enrolling) in a graduate program at Masters or Doctoral level.

Plan on attending KABT’s fall meeting scheduled for Sept. 13th at KU. We’ll meet on the first floor of the school of education’s JRP building just west of the football stadium at 8:30 a.m. for preregistration. We are charging a modest $10 registration fee. There is no registration form but leave me a comment to this post if you think you are coming so we can get an idea of the numbers. KU’s school of education tech department has graciously made their computer labs available for this meeting. Most of the meeting will feature hands-on computer explorations of WEB 2.0 applications and their impact on biology education. The day is scheduled in 45 minute blocks. Two blocks have concurrent sessions.

8:30-9:00 a.m. . . . .Registration

9:00-9:45 a.m. . . . . Into to Web 2.0 application–The world is different now…

9:50-10:35 a.m. . . . KABT BioBlog and classroom blogging

10:35-11:00 a.m. . .Break and short business meeting

11:05-11:50 a.m. . . Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace
or. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scott and Kylee Sharp’s Natural History Curriculum

11:55-12:40 p.m. . . Collaborative spreadsheets:

Working on the same document with all of your class
or . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scott and Kylee Sharp’s AP and General Biology Curricula

12:40-12:50 p.m. . Wrap Up and break for lunch on the way to west campus

2:00-3:00 p.m. . . . .Tour of the Monarch Watch facilities:
BioHouse, Rearing, and Butterfly Garden. Chip Taylor

3:00-3:30 p.m. Travel to the KU Field Station (optional)

3:30-4:30 p.m. Optional Tour of the KU Biological Field Station
(Scott Campbell or Bob Hagen)

Leave me a comment, here if you plan to attend. For now these two videos can set the stage, give you an idea of what we will cover and whet your appetite. These two videos were produced by a dynamic assistant professor at KSU, Michael Wesch.

You can find the videos on this page. I moved them because school sites were blocking their viewing and hence the post itself.

BW

As a kid growing up in central Kansas, one of my special places was a wash out downstream from a concrete bridge that held water only after a significant rain.   We called this pool the Tadpole Pond and I can guess that you have a good idea why.  After every spring and summer rain when there was water in the pool, several of us in the neighborhood would round up our seines, jars, nets, and coolers in preparation of the big event–catching tadpoles by the hundreds along with the occasional crawdad, treasured green sunfish, black bullhead or snake.  For me and my friends the Tadpole pond was our African Water Hole–we learned a lot of biology in the mud and muddy water.  Who would have thought that a concrete bridge could create such a special place.

I have a new but similar special place where I keep track of the Kansas Aquatic environment and it too seems at first to be an unlikely spot:

This is a low-water bridge for the lake outlet as it crosses one of the main trails in Johnson County’s Kill Creek Park.  Remarkably, unimpressive as a natural area isn’t it?  I started building my own personal memories here about 6 years ago when I would coax my son into playing hooky from his PhD studies and convince him to bring his new daughter, Emma out for nature hikes with Grandpa.  One mid-May day at this particular site, Scott heard an unusual call that he thought was a warbler of some type.  While Emma and I played  on the concrete bridge Scott tracked down the calling warbler which he knew all along was a Black-throated Blue–he just didn’t want to make a bad call.  For me this has always been the BTB crossing….

This spring I stopped by this crossing on three separate days about 2 weeks apart.  On a whim in April I stopped after a significant rain–not planning on stopping at the crossing but when I got there I realized that I had picked a good day.  As I sat down next to the outlet tubes I observed in the thin water good numbers of darters and minnows making their way upstream to spawn–just like the more famous salmon.  The orange-throated darters would congregate just below the concrete apron and heave themselves in a mad dash in the fast current.  Because the concrete was so level I was able to get good views of darters, creek chubs and stone rollers as they made there way upstream.

This may be a pimephlales minnow followed by a male orangethroated darter.

Male orange throated darter Etheostoma spectabile

Females

I had a great time for the next couple of hours taking pictures and observing this early spring migration.

Later, in May I went back, the water was down and very clear.  I could see several green sunfish displaying to each other  in the pool, a black bullhead and a number of minnows.  Not thinking I’d see much else I was about to leave when I suddenly became aware (notice I didn’t say I observed them) of several Northern Water Snakes.  Once I was aware, I was astounded at the number of smallish water snakes that kept swimming upstream to this pool.  I never saw more than 6 at any one time but over the hour I was there, I estimate that I saw and average of a new snake every 1.5 to 2 minutes.  Most swam up the stream, to the pool and then tried to swim the concrete culvert–unsuccessfully.

This one decided not to swim…

I have no idea what the snakes were up to but it was another great day.  Actually, I do have an unproven hypothesis–I think the smaller snakes move upstream on these intermittent streams to access the new food resources that will be available  in the developing habitat and to exploit the pools as they dry up.

I returned two weeks later after another rain.  This time the water was cloudy and again I thought I really wouldn’t see anything but I was wrong.  While trying to get a picture of a young 5-lined skink on the same rock as the snake in the picture above, I happened to look down in the boiling muddy water in a small eddy just as a large common snapper (ever hear of a small one? lifted its head out of the water with an open gape just inches from my elbow–again I was too slow with the camera.   Each time I’ve visited the BTB crossing this spring, I’ve had an eventful day and like the darters I plan to return next spring for more of the show.

BW

KABT’s next web presence was again managed and donated by a volunteer–one who worked at the university and had access to his own servers and program assistance. The mechanics of this web page was ahead of its time, utilizing databases to maintain the content of the site and scripting to produce the formatting on the site to create what is known as dynamic web pages. This is an important point to consider, today when starting a web presence and with the tools widely available today it is relatively easy to do. Modern web design works to separate the content of the web site from the formatting of the web site. This has a number of advantages but two are most important. Content that is mostly format neutral can be stored in databases. Since the content is stored in the database it can now be independently called up to the web page through a number of different paths. For example, content describing a member’s presentation at a meeting can show up on the main page, a page dedicated to lab resources, or a page dedicated to meetings–all with only a one time entry of the content. The other advantage to such a system is that the look and feel of the web site is easily managed and changed. In this type of system one can easily change the overall appearance of the website by developing new script to call the content pieces. Changing the look usually means only changing a few scripts. When KABT used this type of web presence we relied, again, on the expertise of our volunteer. Re-writing and designing script, managing databases etc. require a fair amount of skill–beyond what the average biology teacher is willing to invest. For this reason the membership was very dependent on our “web-master”, all of our content had to go through him to be placed on the site. Our web-master made it clear that he had a limited amount of time for creating new content–that would be up to the membership and the board. But like the difficulty every newsletter editor has experienced in soliciting material for the newsletter our “web-master” found that getting new and fresh content was extremely difficult. This led to really well-designed website with an unfortunately small amount of content and so it had little value to the membership.

That brings us to today’s web environment where web-publishing has become incredibly accessible and powerful. There are two web developments that I think really make web site creation and maintenance easy for even web novices–Content Management Systems (CMS) and Blogging platforms. If your school district is not using a CMS to manage all the different teacher, department and school web sites that a district may need then they should be. No other current technology, today, offers such a coordinated, powerful, flexible and useful web authoring system. Once a CMS system is set up, individual teachers or site authors can edit and maintain their own web site in an environment very similar to a word-processing environment. Using a CMS still requires someone to “manage” the CMS itself but the advantages are clear and many for an organization like a school district. Small professional societies might consider a CMS but generally this type of tool provides more power (and hence more complications) than needed for a small organization. I’m going to focus the next article on the Blogging platforms as a a web site/authoring tool that provides most of the advantages of a CMS but are easier to set-up, maintain and redesign. Blogging platforms offer one other advantages that is particularly well suited for a professional organization–they encourage community through interaction. This web site (kabt.org) and also the IABT‘s web site are both constructed on blogging platforms. Choosing this strategy has apparently made a big difference for our organization. After only one year, our web site has more than 130 postings or contributions from 10 different members and comments from several others. The site is currently averaging more than 80 page views a day and is serving its purpose well–as a resource for the biology teaching community. Each week, now, more biology teachers come to our site for news than entire readership for a year of newsletters. More importantly, we seem to have reached a tipping point because the site usage is growing each week. Even if you have a web presence for your professional organization consider a blogging platform. I think you’ll find the advantages worth the switch. The next article will cover the features of a blogging platform and how to get started with your organization’s own blog web presence.

The year before I had challenged to the board to become active participants on a blog that I had created several years ago—Teaching Biology.

The challenge was to make just one quick post every 2 weeks and build an ever expanding resource for all biology teachers. The results were predictable—a couple of posting by some but again no follow through. Still, I knew that blogging platforms offer some serious advantages to an organization like KABT. They are dynamic and interactive. The interactivity is the key—not only can individual board members post articles, easily but anyone viewing the site can write a comment to the postings. Blogs are very easy to set-up and maintain compared to a modern web-site. Blogs can be set up so that multiple authors or board members can post.

The discussion continued to play out; leading me to eventually, as a non-board member make a proposal. I didn’t want to give up on the idea of using a blogging platform to host our KABT website. I think that the problem with the “Teaching Biology” blog was that most of the posts dealt with ideas and stories—not news or information about biology teaching. With that in mind and Todd’s offer considered, I offered to purchase server space to house our website and set up and run the site. I again challenged the officers of KABT to get on the site and post ideas, news, introductions, etc. The meeting described took place in January. By the end of February I had the KABT BioBlog up and running with input from several board members. Last fall the site was successfully presented to the membership. To date we’ve had postings from several board members, occasional comments and we’ve established connections with former members.

At this fall’s NABT meeting there was quite a bit of interest and the folks at IABT have started a similar effort. I still have to put up too much of the content, myself but I think things are working well enough now to promote this as an idea for other organizations. At NABT, I was asked to consider making a presentation at next year’s meeting about creating an interactive website. I don’t want to wait that long so this is the first of a series of articles for NABT affiliates about using blogging platforms as their web presence.

BW

Wednesday at NABT’s national conventions are usually reserved for workshops and field trips. This year a late entry to the workshop program caught my eye and sparked my interest. Dr. Rob Pennock scheduled a workshop to introduce a student resource for exploring evolution concepts in a sophisticated artificial life environment while learning to actually do biology–Avida-ED. He had told me about this work two years before and I was really looking forward to its unveiling. Due to the late announcement of the workshop there were only a few attendees but I guarantee all were impressed. I was able to recruit several NABTer’s and they were not disappointed. Our own Eric Kessler was one and he has promised that he will be adding a post here, as he explores Avida and tries it out with his students. In the meantime, you can try it out yourself–check it out.

BW

It is truly amazing what we can do today, isn’t it?

BW

KABT members from KS (besides Todd) I saw in attendance include: Paula Donham, Sandy Collins, Randy Dix, Eric Kessler, Pat Wakeman, Terry Callendar, Harry McDonald and Sondra Dubowsky. I apologize to those I left out, memory isn’t what it used to be. (Make sure you comment to the post and we’ll get you in.) You’ll notice that the presenters at the KABT Share-a-thon (Sandy, Randy, Paula and guess who) have provided handouts or resources here on the KABT BioBlog. The session was well attended and we had a number of comments on how folks really like the format and atmosphere. If you haven’t attended or presented, we divided the room in to four regions and rotated the group every 10-15 minutes so that every one had a chance to interact with the presenters. Pat W. was there taking beaucoup de picts that I hope will be appearing here on the BioBlog one of these days. I’m sure they will be evident in the newsletter.

One final NABT thing: This year is one of the most important transitional years our organization has faced. The board and staff have truly worked very well together to meet this extraordinary challenge–my hat’s off to them for a job well done. We have a new staff member at NABT who, I think, is a great addition to an already great staff–Jaclyn Reeves-Pepin. Her official title is Director of Development. Based on how much she’s accomplished already, I can’t wait to see what plays out over the next year.

If you are not a member of NABT, think about it. If you have any inkling at all that you think NABT membership is something you want to consider, do it right now. Click on the link in the upper right-hand corner, or here and join.

BW