Our High School Science Teacher Conference - It Rocked!

So, this is one of the things that has been keeping me busy the last couple of weeks.

Essentially, the lab hosted a largish conference for high school science teachers (about 95 registrants) - as well, we took the tact of blogging the conference so that almost all of the content is already up (by my calculation, all content will be up by week's end).

Here are some highlights:

- We had 4 great talks (available to view) by William Rees, Hadi Dowlatabadi, Patrick Keeling, and Brian Ellis, who covered a wide range of topics, but all (fittingly) involved elements of sustainability, education, ecology, as well as technologies that play a role (good or bad) in these areas. I'll probably highlight each one individually in the upcoming weeks, but if you want to check them out sooner, just click on the above link.

- We also had 3 activities planned for our teachers including lab tours, and a super conductivity demo (must buy a YBCO disk!). The activity that was a bit hit was a DIY Leeuwenhoek Microscope. Literally, with only a pasteur pipette, cardboard, a stapler, thumb tack, a cover slip, and some flame, you can construct a microscope capable of 100x to 200x magnification.

- The conference actually also ran a second day, where the second day primarily concerned itself with teachers getting together to develop a lesson plan. As well, we tried to incorporate blogging into this, so that folks had an opportunity to work with blogging software to assist in this activity. An example of what teachers came up with in the space of about 2 hours can be seen here.

All in all, a fun conference. We'll have some more photos for the conference online soon as well.