Iowa Academy of Science ~ Iowa Science Teacher's Section Fall Conference Reflections

Thursday and Friday found me attending my 22nd IAS/ ISTS Fall Conference!  Dean Hartman helped me remember when I joined as that was the year Dean was Fall Conference Chair and the conference was held in Cedar Rapids.  

On Thursday, Nannette and I first attended the Iowa Department of Education Quarterly Conversations hosted at McFarland Nature Center where we had a rich afternoon full of sharing and reconnecting with many Science Consultants from around the state.  Then off to the ISTS Evening Banquet honoring the Presidential Excellence in Math and Science award winner and showcasing the IPTV production on the History of One Room Schoolhouses throughout Iowa.  The food was good, the conversation was invigorating and the video was informative.

During the Friday all - day conference; I attended many of the Exhibitor's booths and learned about:

• the progress of the Iowa Bedrock Map,
• Whiterock Conservancy
• the Blank Park Zoo
• Drake online courses
• Pasco Probes
• resources free from the USGS

Sessions I attended taught me about

1. STEM resources offered by IPTV (one I particularly loved was the NOVA titled The Secret Life of Scientists.  I highly recommend that you watch Mollie because I loved the MIT cheer she modeled! 
2. GPS and GIS at UNI (Chad did a nice job highlighting the benefits and challenges of using technology to help students model important ESS concepts).  I strongly suggest that you visit his website to learn more about his efforts to capture video of GSI Field Trips (like the one I attended yesterday) to share as virtual field trips with educators and students across Iowa.
3. Galileo was the post-lunch keynote speaker and he was a consummate educator.  I most appreciated his human model of his Natural Numbers in his inclined plane experiments.  I will view that Force and Motion investigation differently the next time I get the chance to facilitate that unit with Julie.
4. Jason's former physics teaching college Matt presented on his UNI Masters Thesis and introduced us all to a new resource titled:  Ranking Tasks in Physics; a resource I want to locate.  He also mentioned a standardized test to measure student reasoning in Physics - Jason is going to get that information and share it with me soon!
5. I ended the day assisting Richard Heathcote in our presentation on the Whiterock Conservancy 2011 ISTS Field Trip.  You can learn more about that by going to my YouTube video.

For a look at the content offered feel free to review the ISTS Fall Conference Advance Program (this was a PDF that I downloaded and then reuploaded to my Google Documents for reference.)  Nannette and I debriefed our day on the drive home; but I still look forward to reading what she posts on her blog as a post-conference reflection.