New Jersey

The DEN fleet has left the harbor and is looking for a bountiful fall harvest of STARs from all around the country.  It’s a short season and the six DEN captains need your help catching new STARs.

If you recruit a new STAR by December 1, 2008 and report your catch, you can pick from the following:

• Deadliest Catch Season 4 DVD set
• Planet Earth: The Filmmaker’s Story
• Mythbusters Season 4 DVD set

In addition the crew that recruits the most STARs will walk away with bragging rights and a very special DENliest Catch chicklet to post on their blogs, websites and email signatures.

Meet your captains:

Kim Randall guides the Wild and Wacky Western
AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR and WA

Justin Karkow commands the Center of Attention
AZ, KS, MO, ND, NE, NM, OK, SD, TX, UT and WY

Mike Bryant skippers the Dawn Treader
IA, IL, IN, MI, MN and WI

Dennis Swain leads the Northeastern
CT, MA, ME, NH, NY, RI and VT

Matt Monjan navigates the high seas with MPEG: Queen of the Mid-Atlantic
DE, MD, NJ, OH, PA and VA

Brad Fountain captains the Southern STARs
AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN and WV

OK Folks- time to help out our NJ DEN LC leader! One of the video classes in Bev Plein’s school is doing a project about people’s thoughts on the upcoming Presidential Election and they are trying to gather some data. That’s where we come in They have created a short survey that should take just a few minutes to complete. So please give in to your sense of civic responsibility and help them out. The students are hoping to get at least 100 responses, so lets see if we can’t help them out & give them some good data to work with!

FYI: The survey is in 2 parts (that’s what they had to do with the free version of Survey Monkey):

Election Survey Part 1

Election Survey Part 2

Whenever you get a chance, do yourself a favor & check out this Space!

What is Space?

• First of all, it is a GooglePage, so it’s another great example of the collaborate power of Google Applications (GooglePages is still in the Google Labs phase)
• Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it is a Student “Project” created and managed by students, for students! (created by students from the Youth Twitter Network another post for another time- stay tuned!)
• Space is a global digital-literary magazine that presents students’ artistic work. There had been two issues published so far, and the third one is coming soon (Space Issue #2)
• Space is a great way for students to get their personal artistic work seen as well as peer-reviewed by students from all around the globe

What kind of work Does Space accept?

• Space accepts almost every kind of digital work- art, music, poetry, movie clips, essays, columns… any original work student want people to read, watch or listen to

How do students submit their material?

• How to submit work to SPACE
• Note: Submission deadline for Issue #3 is MAy 25th
• High School Student Submissions are Strongly Encouraged!

We should definitely keep our eye on this project to see how it progresses & also share it with our students to promote the cause! AND, in the true spirit of collaboration, after you check out the project site, please come back here and leave a comment sharing your thoughts

This looks like a great collaborative project- I’m going to get me environmental science class involved:

Project Budburst

Project BudBurst invites citizen scientists to join in a field campaign to study the timing of life cycle events of native tree and flower species across the country. This valuable information can be compared to historical records to illustrate the effects of climate change. Last year’s inaugural event drew thousands of people of all ages taking careful observations of the phenological events. As a result of the pilot field campaign, data collected can be used by scientists to learn about the responses of individual plant speciesto climatic variation locally, regionally, and nationally. The 2007 campaign garnered enthusiastic response and robust participation, so they’ve extended the project to year!

Projects like this a are a really great way to run authentic experiments with our students and to show them that, together, we really CAN make a difference