This week's assignment is: Use Creative Commons image search to find an appropriate image to use in at least one of the classes you teach. Include this image in a blog post and share how you plan to use it in the classroom. How can visual imagery support your curricular content?

I used the Creative Commons image search to find the following image of an ant sipping from a drop of sugar-water:

This lovely macro can be useful in the biology classroom in many ways. Firstly, the picture can be used as an entry into the nature of pollination. The sugar-water the ant is sipping was placed there by the photographer, but it brings to mind nectar and the "exchange of services" between plants and their pollinators. The true nectar (or enticing scent) is likely to be located at the base of the flower, ensuring that the ant brushes the pollen-laden strands on its way to a sugary reward.

Secondly, it shows the surface tension of a water droplet and gives a sense of water's cohesion. At the scale of an ant, the three dimensional nature of water droplets in more vivid and real than what students ordinarily experience. The immediacy and reality of biological events can be conveyed very powerfully with images, and this is especially effective when they demonstrate things that students can't observe without the help of special technologies. This could be something on a small scale, such as the gorgeous diversity of diatom shells, or a large scale, like deforestation. It could be processes slowed down in time, like a basilisk lizard running across the surface of the water, or it could be processes speeded up, such as the amazing time-lapse movies seen in David Attenborough's "The Private Life of Plants".

Finally, these ways of improving our perceptions, seeing the detail and intricacy and "big picture" of life and living systems increase student interest and often instill a sense of wonder and respect for the things normally 'beneath' our notice, or beyond it. For students, this can translate into a greater overall connectedness to the world around them and the ability to think more creatively, from a broader perspective, and with greater insight.

Thus visual imagery is an indispensible support for my curricular content.

Another Spice in the Pot: CoETaIL's Influence on My Methods of Instruction

The assignment this week is: Write a reflective blog post on how the courses to date in this program have changed your teaching for the new year.

As educators, we incorporate countless sources of information into our instruction and make myriad choices about instruction.

Some of the sources of information we sift through each day in creating a coherent lesson include curricular goals, current news in our discipline, student and class dynamics including language proficiency and learning styles, and even the time of day or energy level when the students walk into the room.

Some of the choices we face daily include when to provide direct instruction and let students learn through exploration, when to encourage or rein in discussion that may meander interestingly off course, when to assess with "points" and when to take the pressure off, when to have student in groups and when they should work alone, when to bouy up students and when to have them take responsibility for themselves, and of most relevance here, when to incorporate the varied technologies at our disposal.

These choices read like Ecclesiastes - to everything there is a season. No one choice is right for all situations. A good educator must make judicious use of all this information and make effective, balanced, and compassionate choices that will help students learn content, become more self-sufficient learners, nurture their inherent interest, and also (I feel) make them more caring, competent citizens.

What CoETaIL has offered me is the chance to explore emerging technologies in a deliberate fashion and to improve lessons that are already good, even great, but which can now have a new enriching dimension that was not easily available when I started teaching 10 years ago. As a particular example, I am interested in students abilities to continue their discussion and explorations with each other outside of the class setting. Online communication among classmates offers many advantages, especially for reaching students uncomfortable with public speaking, or asking questions with everyone's attention on them, or who need longer to process and come up with good questions than they have during face-to-face classroom time, or who develop a sense of confidence from helping their peers; the list goes on.

I say adding ideas from CoETaIL to my teaching is like adding another spice to the pot. This is a better analogy than, let's say, adding another tool to the toolbox, because I can do more than simply solve one problem or complete a specific type of task. Incorporating new types of imagery, new methods of communication, new avenues of expression add richness and depth to the diverse and already-established methods of instruction. A teacher's bag of tricks is more than the sum of its parts; just as the flavour of a dish is more than the sum of its spices.