My iPad broke yesterday.  It was in a case (of course), in a bag (of course), and it was dropped less than four feet on to my driveway.  The housing was dented, and the screen was cracked in a series of radiating fractures, precipitating small slivers of gorilla glass.  It was unpleasant and displeasing.

If you haven’t had the experience of bringing an iPad in to a genius bar for repair (today was my first time), Apple will not repair an iPad.  They will offer you a “full-swap”, which will cost you $250, and take a week.  You might say yes.  You might say no.

Or, if you’re me, you’ll decide to pay twice that much for a brand-new iPad.  

I can’t tell you if this is an analytical triumph or a facet of a mental illness (I’d wager more the latter).  But it happened.  And if it is an illness, it’s apparently communicable, as my lovely wife agreed that this was the obvious course of action.

In the past two years, I have had two iPads (grant-funded), and acquired a third one for my lovely wife (also grant-funded).  They are great machines.  When you haven’t paid a cent for them, they are beyond incredible.  But, if you want to keep the bubble of cost-indemnification from bursting, you’ll need to do a better job protecting the things than I did.  

For the record, I did purchase a more formidable case for the new one.  

During the past two weeks, I have had the opportunity to take advantage of various modern structures as I endeavored to create and deploy a population growth modeling activity in my AP Biology class.  The process used a series of modern computing tools, and enabled me to collaborate with folks across the country from the comfort of my computer.  So, I thought it might be worthwhile discussing the process, which could be easily adapted for anyone interested in creating pretty much anything educational, ever.

I suppose the whole thing began when Brad Williamson wrote a series of blog posts for NABT wherein he discussed how he uses spreadsheet models when teaching pre-service teachers, and cited the specific example of the “sparrow” model from the BSCS textbook series.  I have been aware of these posts for a while now (Brad is one of my favorite e-colleagues.  We have collaborated on a few AP Biology initiatives over the last few years—someday, we might even meet each other in person), and I have thought about taking the process that he describes and making something a bit more guided for AP Biology students for a year or so.  Being that I’m a busy little monkey, I didn’t really have the time to focus on it until these last two weeks, as my own class approaches our ecology unit for the year.  Once I did focus on it, I found that it was not particularly time consuming to construct the document that I envisioned.  A few periods on the Google Docs, and I was pretty much all set.  

Up to this point, I haven’t really described anything particularly novel for my process.  Most of the work that I do is based on the work that other people do.  And Google Docs is pretty much my default word-processor at this point in time.  But after I finished this activity, I wanted to get some feedback on it, so I enabled “anyone can comment”, and stuck the link to the document up on the AP Biology Teacher Community, where any interested teacher could take a look and leave a note or two about what they liked, and (more importantly) what they might change.  I haven’t used the “anyone can comment” feature prior to this activity, but I totally get the utility of it.  People leave their comments, and then I can make the modifications to the document that I want to make, and ignore any comments that I might want to ignore.  It’s a perfect system for getting peer feedback.

After the comments were made, and revisions incorporated, I was ready to use the activity with my students, which took place during the past three days of class.  The structure of the activity moves students through creating a series of spreadsheets for increasingly complex population models.  Here is my own, test-run, data:

Following this progression, students take the models and make a modification of their own design to model a new aspect of the population or the environment.  Students then post their modified models on the course blog, which you can check out here.  Some of the stuff they did is pretty darn cool, if you ask me.  

Anyway, that’s the process and the result.  I think there’s a lot of promise in the notion of making an activity and then opening it up for peer feedback.  I’ve used the “anyone can edit” feature of google docs quite a bit to make documents from scratch with a bunch of folks, but the “anyone can comment” feature is pretty awesome for circumstances where you just want to know what folks think about the work that you are doing.  

At the beginning of the current school year, I was asked to serve as the assistant advisor for our school’s FIRST Robotics Team (Dean Kamen should be proud of me, I referred to it in the way that he would prefer that I did).  Having expressed some passing interest at the end of last year, more a factor of the conclusion of my major extracurricular time-sink for the prior four years (Class of 2011 co-advisor), I was somewhat hesitant.  Free time is never something that I have in spades, and even with minor understanding of what was involved, I was not at all certain that I had the proper amount of time needed to be the assistant advisor.  I voiced my concerns to the advisor, and he assured me that it wasn’t a major investment of time on my part.  I would need to be present at the three competitions, and spend the typical amount of time advising the sub-set of students who would be focused on programming the robot.  It wouldn’t matter all that much that I had very little experience programming in the language that the robot used (LabView), by default, I am the most technologically-literate staff member in the building (if not the district).  The fact that I have any experience programming anything put me a few steps ahead of the rest of the pack.  Guidelines established, I agreed.

It soon became clear that by agreeing to serve in this capacity, I was granted a front row seat to one of the more depressing phenomena that the modern school has to offer:  the dying club.  

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It does seem that I have some amount of finite bandwidth for my life activities, as evidenced by the fact that whenever the various rivulets of my life increase their flow, this particular stream trickles down to almost nothing.  Recently, for instance, things around here have been pretty static.  Pretty much, you just get an instagram photo here and there.  Here is a brief discussion of what I have been doing while not maintaining this blog:

• I was taking three grad classes, the last three of my sequence for an administrative certificate, prior to an internship, which will begin toward the end of the summer.  I wrote eight papers in eight weeks, and was rewarded with A’s for my effort (which outside of the papers, mostly consisted of me spouting off about something or other on the discussion forums of the three courses).  These courses did very little to persuade me that I might ever want to use this certificate for its supposed purpose, but I’m too far in now to get out.
• I was assistant-advising our school’s FIRST Robotics team.  Build season has been going on since mid-January, and it ended yesterday, with an unspectacular finish toward the bottom of the pack at the local regional competition.  
• I was involved in negotiating a modification of our current contract in our district, chiefly to prevent fourteen of the folks who I work with at the high school (and another ten or so around the district) from being excessed due to the Governor’s idiotic tax cap and restrictions to state aide.  This involved a seemingly endless series of meetings to discuss possible options, followed by several contentious meetings moving from the executive board of the union to the entire membership, and finally culminating in a vote (for approval) this past friday.
• I was at a BOE meeting every Tuesday night for the last four weeks, with another four to go before budget season is over.
• I was applying for two different grants for my classroom, and receiving one.  The other is still being finalized.
• I was filling out the application forms for two different recognitions that I was asked to apply for, both of which are very nice, but neither of which are necessary for validation of my worth as an educator.
• I was writing a curriculum module for AP Biology that integrates visual arts in to the overall course at a few key moments.  In fact, I’m still writing it, and will be doing so for the next six weeks.
• I was writing a new course audit for my AP Biology course, to submit prior to the change in the course that begins next year.  It was approved within 72 hours of being submitted.
• I have been migrating my chemistry slideware presentations to sliderocket to increase student utility and accessibility.
• I was starting to play with a new camera that my father just purchased for myself and BH.
• I have been successfully not focusing on what is going to happen at the end of this current school year.

That’s a pretty good synopsis.  But now that (some) of that is resolved, I have some time back, and a lot to talk about, so hopefully, this particular spigot will start to open again.