Educational Technology Trips

 

About half of all breeding pairs of the blue-footed booby live on the Galapagos Islands, which are a group of islands about 600 miles (965 kilometers) off the coast of mainland Ecuador.

(Tortuga Bay - Santa Cruz-A couple of marine iguanas bask in the hot sun on the beach of Tortuga Bay, near to the main town of Puerto Ayora.)

When I heard about this trip, I was so excited because I have been to Ecuador so many times. Needless to say because my parent's culture and heritage are from Ecuador. More importantly now, because many educational programs/trips in Math and Science are being conducted there, due to Ecuador's vast rainforests,volcanoes, beaches and exotic animal species. It always has been famous for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution that he conducted his research in the Galapagos Islands of the coast of Ecuador.
I am constantly surprised and amazed on how technology has enhanced learning for students and teachers. At one of the middle schools in Kearny, NJ where I sometimes substitute teach a select group of teachers and Montclair State University Graduate students traveled to Ecuador, South America. This trip was a courtesy of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The journey was part of an NSF-sponsored grant program called GK12 Fellows in the Middle, which matches graduate students from Montclair State University with math and science teachers in Kearny middle school classes twice a week. NSF pays for the trip to promote an exchange with researchers and teachers abroad.
They visited the Universidad Tecnologica Equinoccial, a Quito (capital city of Ecuador)based university, and a special school called Millennium El Beatario whose students are chosen by a lottery. They also made long bus trips to the Equator Museum site and to a cloud forest and rainforest, where they spent two nights.
One of the teacher's captured video footage, which she plans to show to her students as part of a lesson on biodiversity – of such creatures as the Galapagos penguin and the dart frog that are “endemic to the region.”
At the Equator monument, a teacher filmed some scientific demonstrations depicting the “Coriolis effect,” how the earth’s rotation can deflect the path of an object in motion – water will flow counter-clockwise north of the equator, clockwise south of it and straight in the center of it. Also: an egg can be balanced on the top of a nail in the “center” of the equator line. A few days before the group left Ecuador, the teachers conducted a live video conference from Quito with Kearny students who watched the hookup in the Kearny High School auditorium. The Kearny kids asked about Ecuadorian food, culture, schools and climate, among other things, and got to chat with several Ecuadorian students. Kearny teachers and administrators will try to assess what impact, if any, the interaction of the graduate interns and classroom teachers had on students’ performance in math and science.


(Monument marking the Equator, on the outskirts of Quito, Ecuador)