My students have been getting comments from a computer class in Oregon. I’m not sure if anyone has commented back yet–this will need to be addressed tomorrow.

Unfortunately tomorrow is our last day of school and I’m not sure how many of my darlings will continue to blog over the summer. I will make it part of their final to comment on a blog at the Beaverton school. The cool thing is that many of them have blogs about issues they care about. It might be a nice circle back to the conversations that we had about what we care most deeply about and how we can inform, persuade, and effect change by communicating with others. Perhaps there will be some empathy with people who are trying to effect change in their own small way.

The other thing that was great for me to see on the Beaverton students’ blogs was the way they had incorporated multi-modal forms of communication (video, images, surveys, posters) All were cited, I was glad to see :-). I’m not sure if edublogs supports surveys or not, but I’m going to investigate. That could be a great resource next year. It looked like the Beaverton school used Google to do the survey. I’ll have to play around.

On Monday we are going to screen the segments and the class will critique each one. We have one more late night tomorrow–I’m not sure how many kids will stay. Today when I was walking around, I could see that the segments were coming together.

Some of my favorite quotes from the day:

• Do we really have to cut it down to 5 minutes–our segment could be 20 minutes, easy.
• Oh, I guess we should include our research.
• You have a great voice for the narration.
• Do I really sound like that?
• I hate my voice.
• Are you going to make us a DVD of this when we finish?
• You mean I get to take this home!
• Mr. Craddick’s interview has soooooo much information–he’s so smart.
• I can’t find any good music on these sites–do you have any more ideas?
• Can I just create my own music?

I finally figured it out! I knew you could split those tracks and that you could put something over the video track, but I couldn’t figure out how. After calls to my friends Bill and Brian , I finally figured it out all by myself. I feel quite proud .

Here is a screencast showing how to make a cutaway shot using overlays and also how to split audio and video tracks in order to edit them separately.

I found an interesting chart put out by an Australian company that tracks carbon emissions by country.

I was surprised that the US is not the highest. OK we’re close. . .

I also found a Canadian blog that is a resource for teachers, but would be great for any kind of research on environmental studies.

Please post an idea for an organizing principle for the entire documentary. It will be like a thesis for an essay.

Also post a focus statement for your segment. It will be like a topic sentence for an essay. Make sure you tell what your group is

Click here for a video showing you how to split video clips into scenes using Adobe Premiere Elements.

Click here to watch a video that shows you how to

• rename still files
• change the orientation of the photo (portrait to landscape)
• change transitions between photos slide show
• delete image from video

Click here for an introductory video to using Adobe Premiere Elements. We are using this program rather than Movie Maker because this one allows us to have multiple audio tracks. We will want to have narrated voice-overs as well as music going at the same time, and this program allows for that kind of flexibility. Premiere Elements also allows us to do some really cool effects that we’ll get into in later screencasts.

Can Climate Change Make Us Sicker? 

Jason shared this Time/CNN article with me–it was really intersting.

In this article, Bryan Walsh writes about the effect of climate change on human health, including

• a rise in malaria caused by the increase in strong downpours
• heat related deaths caused by heat waves in places not used to such temperatures (Europe 2003), especially the elderly
• water borne diseases because the water cycle changes (heavy rainfall)

“For him, carbon dioxide should be treated as a pollutant that damages human health, albeit indirectly, and it’s in our medical interests to reduce it. ‘Energy policy becomes one and the same as public health policy,’ says Patz”

Check out the Nature editorial that says that slowing global warming would be very difficult because the “technological changes needed to decarbonize energy could be much harder than we thought”–are we already too late?

“the priority should be adapting our public health system to a warmer world, versus spending on carbon mitigation.”

Patz thinks that we have a plan for  the effects is important but even more important would be “cutting off the problem upstream”

On the page of this article, there was a podcast  that was an interview with Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental studies and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (that’s where Mr. Landow went to school–I wonder if he knows him!), in which he elaborated on some of the ideas in Walsh’s article.  It was also a good example of an expert interview–I think the interviewer may have been Walsh.

Some interesting ideas:

• Important not just adapting, but fighting the causes–

• Greenhouse gases have a 1/2 life of 70-100 years–we will have a warming, so we will need to adapt, but that is not all–if we only focus on that, “we’re mopping up the floor while the faucet is still running”

• Patz talks about the importance of environmental policy merging with energy policies and health policies–they all converge with climate change.

Reflection

This was an informative article and interview.  The fact that the CO2 is not going away for awhile, no matter what we do made me realize that adaptation and preparation for the health and economic concerns is going to be essential.  But that is not enough–I think people may think the fix is the solution–we’ll take our medicine and avoid malaria, but do nothing to stop the cause of the disease (literal and metaphoric).

This morning when I was driving to work and heard a great NPR story about a college student who was going to all kinds of conferences on global warming. She is a real activist. Then some of the things she was saying made it sound like she was at Wash U and lo and behold she was! When I got to school I looked up the story about this Climate Policy Wonk–she might be a good lead for an expert interview.

Today we had the kids write about what they had learned so far.

• What you’ve learned?
• What’s surprised you?
• What should the focus of your segment be (based on what you know so far)?
• What further research do you need?
• Do you have any research that could help another group? (and what are you going to do about it?)

For the most part, they gave thoughtful responses.

We also talked more about academic discourse and that part of continuing the discussion is to answer the questions and address the comments that the blog-readers pose. They needed direct instruction to open the links that others gave them and to respond to those articles. The blog readers have been unbelievably helpful. They have raised thoughtful questions and have been excited to share resources.

Now interviews. I’m getting a bit nervous. We started standardized testing today and we really need the time to get some interviews lined up. I guess we could use in-house specialists, but I would like the kids to get the experience of getting outsiders to be a part of the process. I want them to make those cold calls and figure out how to explain what they need and what they need to do to get the information they need. It takes a lot of planning. I’m hoping that the environmental studies department at Wash U. will be a good resource. I’m not sure if I should call ahead or not. . . probably not. But. . . I just hope it get finished before finals!