Email: proof@proofofconcepts.com
Formerly An On-line Staff Development Program
This project was originally designed, delivered, and facilitated for a school district in Florida as an online staff development project. The workshop was conducted during a 6 week time frame and was part of my doctoral dissertation, completed in the Fall of 2000.
The site is undergoing a major change to make it useful as a learning experience for other teachers and students.
This on-line in-service workshop, given in the Spring 2000, and was designed to introduce to the K-12 teacher to the environment through the tools and techniques of Image Processing. These tools can be as simple as a thermometer to as sophisticated as the Hubble Telescope.
Participants used scientific software (NIH or Scion Image) and imaging data to explore changes in the environment. Although the instruction was provided through an earth/space science view, the basic techniques learned are the same for all images.
Another aspect of this workshop was the fact that it required no special "plug-ins" for its successful operation. The entire workshop (chatrooms, threaded discussion, designs, correspondence, forms, etc.) was developed through the use of various Internet resources and HTML editors. The purpose was to analyze the effectiveness of providing this type of workshop using publicly available tools and servers--it was successful.
This K-12 science workshop was a project-based image processing activity. This means the participants were expected to learn how to use NIH software through a comprehensive project. Participants were provided the tools to successfully complete the workshop. Teachers, participanting in this type of experience realized that learning on-line was completely different than face-to-face in scope, socialization, and assessments.
There was no "expert" in the front of the classroom imparting words of wisdom. Instead, teachers who took this in-service were responsible for their own progress and knowledge construction. This aspect of learning is what makes this type of in-service fun, because participants can work together to develop mutual understandings in their learning. This was possibly the first school district sanctioned in-service of this type.
Not only did participants have access to the software instructions for this in-service, but they also had access to all other participants and the instructor through the use of e-mail, chat, and threaded discussion. The instructor held "office hours" during the course of this in-service. This meant that participants came on-line and knew that the instructor would respond to questions immediately during those specific times.
An outgrowth of this site was the development and implementation of a web-project. The project, teachers particpated in, used the techniques of image processing in "The Eye of the Storm," a scenario about Hurricane Opal, which struck Northwest Florida in October 1995.