EWOC Conference Write Up Day 4: Thursday 6th July 2006.

What a great start to the day. I had heard of this before, but never expected to meet the man in person. Dr James Brey showed us a video of how he made a Tornado in his classroom (yes a real Tornado!). You can view the pictures here and there is also a small amount of Google video of the experiment that Brey now repeats several times a year. The great bit about the photographs is that the coloured dots on the floor around the tornado are monopoly houses that James asks his students to bring into class to demonstrate Tornado damage.

Although the experiment would be impossible to perform in a Geography classroom George and I reckon that it is something we should have a go at without students. Brian I might need you to order me a small shed load of dry ice!

One of the other presentations during the morning was by Eric Walters from Marymont School in New York. Eric talked about some great citizenship work he had been doing with classes on global warming, he also talked about blogs and podcasts that his students had been producing. Full information about the project is not up on the Marymont web site just yet as its being up-dated. But I’m looking forward to finding out more about the project when it does get updated. I spent a couple of minutes to have a look at his school web site to see the other types of work that the school in producing. I was very impressed.

The chemical reaction flash animations would be of use to any chemistry teacher, there are some great examples of student work for biology but the piece of work I was most impressed with was how blogging can connect people in the USA and Iraq. If you click on one hyperlink from this post click on this one for a flash animation. I think it’s brilliant.

The other presentation that I think will be of real use to me was information on NOAA’s Adopt a drifter Programme. During the presentation we were shown the Adopt a Drifter Tracking Page which shows the global positions of drifters. A drifter is a buoy that moves with the ocean currents around the globe. It floats in the ocean water and is powered by batteries located in the dome. The drifter data that is collected including GPS location, are sent to a satellite and then to a land station where we can all access the data. There are currently 1250 buoy’s in the ocean.

Here’s the best bit. You can adopt one for your class or geography department. Not only would this be a great way to introduce ocean currents but it would also be a great tool to use when introducing GPS and GIS into the geography classroom. You could also use the data to compare sea surface temperature of different buoys around the globe, it would be an interesting way to investigate energy receipt with latitude and variations in world climate.

In the evening we went to the Cork Restaurant in Boulder. I’ve never had a piece of steak that big before!