Productivity

Among the most challenging of topics for the IB Environmental Systems and Societies students to fully understand is productivity--a measure of the rate at which photosynthesis converts sunlight energy to a chemical form that organisms on earth can use.

After guiding the students through this concept, I will have students relate all they knew about productivity to this image. I expected they would see:
1) there is a lot of green biomass
2) the water is green-photosynthesis is occuring there
3) the birds in the air get energy by eating organisms which get energy from photosynthesis
4) the 'smoke' in the air relates to carbon dioxide which is used for photosynthesis
5) some plants are dead (brown colored)-dry biomass
6) some plants are reddish
7) wood biomass feeds termites
8) fungi decompose all the forest biomass for their energy

Creative Commons image from Tangent~Artifact, here sometimes :)

What made you look here?

The difference is now technology is the first, current, and definitive resource for topics I present or enjoy at home or school.

You Tube contains music (including songs in German that my mother loved when she was young), old movie (Star Trek, Red Skeleton,..), poetry (Poe, Frost, Longfellow), history, science (New Scientist, Brainiacs, about animals) that I use for entertainment, contacts I correspond with now about common hobbies, and the primary source for helping my kids at home (Google Earth, Free Typing, musiceducation, choice words).

How I prepare for my classes is the biggest change in my IT use. I become less inhibited by not knowing and more pro-active in trying out resources I believe will help my students learn: excited about PantherNet, its chat capabilities, the links to TurnItIn.com, and abundance of relevant animations, and the potential of Google forms and Google doc.

But mostly I am more critical of what to use. If a function, site, or program is cumbersome, lacks precision, or out-of-date, I am much more likely to not struggle with is and pass it over for a resource at another site.

The digital aspects of technology are among my weaknesses and I have been looking forward to this course the most of all of them. I hope to learn enough to take risks in bringing a lot more video clips (and maybe even making some), podcasts?, animations, and probably still images into my presentations by taking this course. Maybe I’ll even digitalize some of my important old VHS material.

In addition, I like the dialogue about the look of various web sites (and their advertizements). What made you look here?

Creative Commons image taken on 5 September 2005 by n0nick / Sagie Maoz