Oakland Unified teachers assembling Galileoscopes at ChabotWhat was it like for Galileo, the first time he put an eye to his telescope to see things in the heavens as never before seen? As anyone who has seen a planet or a star cluster or a nebula—or the Moon—through even a small telescope knows, the sight can be quite breathtaking. For Galileo, it must have been a universe-changing experience….

Through a generous donation by a concerned citizen (concerned that kids today aren't seeing enough of the sky), Chabot just completed a pair of workshops for Oakland teachers that places in their capable hands and in their classrooms "Galileoscopes"—special telescopes designed and manufactured for the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. The Galileoscope is a low cost, simple, but good-quality telescope designed to simulate the power and field of view of Galileo's original telescope, which opened up the universe in such a profound way.

In September and October, a total of 23 Oakland teachers received training, activities, and one Galileoscope each (plus tripod), enabling them to share the experience with their students and, hopefully, spark their imagination and curiosity about the world around us in a way that nothing but astronomy does.

A look through a telescope—any telescope, big or small—does put a spark in the eye and the imagination. At least, that was my experience. Growing up in Oakland back in the 60's, I didn't have access to any small telescopes, but Chabot Observatory was only a couple miles away, and my family often went up on a weekend night for a classroom demo, a planetarium show, and thoroughly enjoyable viewing through the two antique telescopes, Leah and Rachel. Something about the actual light from Saturn or Jupiter or a distant galaxy tickling the receptors in your retina places you out there—or puts those objects directly into your brain.

The Oakland teachers now armed with their Galileoscopes will use these simple but effective tools to show their students the difference between seeing Saturn as a spot of light and Saturn as a disk with "ears" (the appearance of its rings through a Galileoscope), or the difference between Jupiter as a brighter spot of light and Jupiter as a world with a giant storm in its clouds and four smaller "worlds" (moons) in orbit around it, or the difference between the Moon as a disk with light and dark areas that make interesting shapes in our imaginations and the Moon with mountain ranges, vast plains, thousands upon thousands of craters, and shadows stretching across the landscape.

By the way, Galileoscopes can still be ordered, through the Galileoscope website, for a short time still, in case you're interested in getting your toe into the door of a much bigger universe….

This field photo of a California Newt (Taricha torosa)
egg cluster and more are free for educational use
What does the metamorphosis of a butterfly look like? What kinds of creatures live in a tidal pool? And just how big is a shark’s tooth? When questions like these come up in science classrooms, some educators are now using digital images to help students frame responses and connect their classrooms with the real world. And, with advances in digital technologies that enable effortless access to digital images, integrating digital pictures into the curriculum has never been easier.

These are some of the reasons Bay Area science educators like Aaron Vanderwerff are using photo-sharing websites such as Flickr to develop innovative image-based activities for their classrooms. Vanderwerff, a teacher and Science Department Chair at San Lorenzo High School, uploaded sets of pictures to Flickr and asked groups of students to select an image and comment on it. Students’ comments focused on observations about the photos as well as inferences they made about the situation. And more and more educators are using digital photos to change the way their students see science. Other examples of Flickr-based educational activities include encouraging students to create collaborative photo sets, facilitating discussions by writing notes and comments, teaching categories and classifications using tags, and geotagging images to connect them with physical locations on a map.

Flickr also houses an extensive collection of community-contributed digital images, including a large number of photos made available by QUEST through the QUEST Collections and the QUEST Pool. The QUEST Collections contain photos related to QUEST stories and the photos in the QUEST Pool are contributed by people who sign up to join the QUEST Flickr Photo Group. All photos in the QUEST Collections are available for use in educational projects and can be downloaded and modified for free under Creative Commons licensing.

Stacy Morrow, who teaches fourth grade at Fair Oaks Elementary School in Redwood City did not need to tell me about her students' enthusiasm for science. It was obvious. Working in teams with a FOSS kit on magnetism and electricity, they could barely contain their excitement at powering a light bulb with a simple electrical circuit.

Like a quarter of California school children, most of Morrow's students are native Spanish speakers. From time to time I'd hear the odd Spanish phrase – along with new English ones, like "serial circuits" and "D-cell batteries" — drift across the room. Morrow believes that as ESL students, her kids are asked to work much harder than other fourth-graders, mastering a second language along with all the other academic demands of elementary school. It must be a relief, I thought, to engage in a subject where teamwork and experimentation are more important than getting all the words right.

Fair Oaks is a "program improvement school," which means it's been identified by federal No Child Left Behind program as falling below target in certain subjects. (Here's an SF Chronicle article about the "stigma" of Program Improvement status). Morrow says test scores at Fair Oaks are on the rise, but, as this recent New York Times article describes, those standards can be tough to meet even for some of the most improved schools.

Given those demands, it's impressive that Morrow and other teachers at Fair Oaks find as much time for science lessons as they do – (it's also rare, as this study showed). Morrow credits this to the FOSS kits and a supportive administration. But she deserves a lot of the credit, for taking the time to educate herself. The Lawrence Berkeley study also showed that many elementary teachers simply don't feel qualified to teach science. That problem is compounded in economic boom times, when high-paying tech jobs make the pool of science-qualified teachers even smaller. It's fortunate that some of the same industries that compete for workers are also helping train more K12 teachers. Our QUEST education team has put together a page of science education resources, which we invite you to check out.

Finally, a disclaimer: We're barely scratching the surface here. I hope everyone watches QUEST's excellent TV story on science literacy, which goes into far more detail than our six-minute radio slot allowed.

Listen to the Closing the Science Gap radio report online.

What is the most compelling reason to use QUEST resources in the science classroom? "They are local", "I can download them", and "short is good." These are a few of the quick responses given by science educators attending QUEST's first 2-day institutes this summer. Forty science teachers from Vallejo to San Jose attended one of two Institutes entitled "Using QUEST Multimedia in the Middle and High School Classroom to Enhance Teaching and Learning" (yes, it’s a mouthful, but you probably get a good idea of what we focused on…). The Institutes were held in partnership with CTAP Region IV at both the San Mateo County Office of Education in Redwood City and the Alameda County Office of Education in Hayward in mid-August.

Participants spent an intense two days discussing the importance of incorporating 21st century skills and multimedia into the science curriculum, learning about and practicing with the science resources on the QUEST website, and ultimately, planning a unit and lesson that incorporate one or more QUEST resources into their curriculum for the upcoming year. They streamed, podcasted and downloaded, left comments on the QUEST blog, explored Explorations, created Google Maps, searched the QUEST Flickr Group, learned about RSS feeds, and started their own social network. Did I mention they only had 2 days?

And of course the hard work paid off with some very creative plans for the '08-'09 school year: students at Centerville Junior High in Fremont will be reading and commenting on the QUEST blog each week, and students at Terra Linda High School in San Rafael will be using QUEST and Google Maps to learn about and locate the most powerful telescopes on Earth. Students at Gompers Continuation High School in Richmond will view QUEST video and use a QUEST Exploration before a field trip where they will collect photos and video to make their own short media piece! These are just a few of the innovative ideas that teachers came up with at the institutes.

In addition to a stipend for their time, these forty teachers will now be the recipients of follow-up support from QUEST Education for the duration of the '08-'09 school year. As the provider of that support, I couldn't be more excited to work with these amazing teachers. In an era of high stakes testing and underfunded, overcrowded classrooms, it is a privilege to work with such dedicated and creative individuals.

To receive updates on opportunities for educators to connect with KQED, sign up for the monthly KQED Science Education Newsletter newsletter at www.kqed.org/newsletters.

Cal Academy scientist Kelly Herbinson
collects ants with a Bay Area science teacherAs the winter drags on, I often think fondly of a chilly Saturday in December where I found myself in a small alleyway in San Francisco trying to suck elusive ants into a rubber tube called a pooter. What was the point of this seemingly silly endeavor? I was leading a QUEST educator training with the California Academy of Sciences (one of the more fun parts of my job).

I was first introduced to the pooter, an insect catching device, last July at the California Academy of Sciences Nature Journaling workshop in the Trinity Alps and little did I know where it would lead.

The Nature Journaling workshop blended sketching and watercolor techniques with information about the natural area in which we camped. In addition to discovering I could actually be artistic (not one of my strong suits in the past) and falling in love with vegan cashew chili (I’m a big fan of meat), the highlight for me was learning how to catch small insects by sucking them into a vial at the end of a long rubber tube.

This contraption, which includes a small piece of gauze between the vial and the rubber tubing, so you don’t suck the insect all the way into your lungs, is the aforementioned pooter. By the end of the workshop, we had planned a joint educator workshop using QUEST media about invasive species with the hands-on ant collecting activities from the Bay Area Ant Survey and the California Academy of Sciences.

QUEST's Jessica Neely
collects ants with a pooterFast forward 4 months. In early December, 29 Bay Area science educators gathered at the California Academy of Sciences to learn about Bay Area invasive species. We started the day off with QUEST’s television story San Francisco Bay Invaders, moved to some discussion about how to help our students become “media savvy” in the 21st century, and then it was time for the pooters.

Educators paired up and we took a field trip to the alley behind the Cal Academy – not the most ideal location to find ants, but it was the best we could do with limited time. It was so cold that day that Kelly Herbinson, our ant expert, had to set out bait for the ants in the morning. We poked, prodded, searched high and low, and a few of us were able to capture the cagey little critters with our pooters. Kelly led us through the identification process (yes, I’m sorry but some ants were harmed) and introduced everyone to the Bay Area Ant Survey, an amazing citizen science project where just about anyone can contribute to scientists’ understanding of the distribution of ants in the Bay Area by capturing, labeling, and sending in their ants.

Teachers study ant samples to
help identify the ants they collectedA few post-workshop take-aways:

• Despite what you hear on the news, science teachers are doing wonderful work with students

• Students are getting their information from an increasing number of sources and teaching them how to be media-savvy is tricky (not something that is currently tested on standardized tests…)

• Most importantly, ants are AMAZING! Did you know that the trap-jaw ant can snap its mandibles shut so hard and fast on an object that it can propel itself backwards 2 feet to escape predators?

Want to participate in an upcoming QUEST Educator Training? Visit our list of upcoming workshops and register.

And please add a comment if you know of a great educational resource for teaching about Bay Area invasive species. And please share your story if you use QUEST with your students!

Jessica Neely is a Project Supervisor of Science Education.

latitude: 37.781891, longitude: -122.403327