Mr. Crockett's Marine Biology Blog

Blogging is a very public activity. Anything that gets posted on the internet stays there. Forever. Deleting a post simply removes it from the blog it was posted to. Copies of the post may exist scattered all over the internet. That is why we are being so careful to respect your privacy and using first names only. We do not use pictures of ourselves. If you really want a graphic image associated with your posting use an avatar — a picture of something that represents you but IS NOT of you.

Two teachers in the U.S.A. worked with their classes to come up with a list of guidelines for student bloggers.

1. Students using blogs are expected to treat blogspaces as classroom spaces. Speech that is inappropriate for class is not appropriate for our blog. While we encourage you to engage in debate and conversation with other bloggers, we also expect that you will conduct yourself in a manner reflective of a representative of this school.

2. Never EVER EVER give out or record personal information on our blog. Our blog exists as a public space on the Internet. Don’t share anything that you don’t want the world to know. For your safety, be careful what you say, too. Don’t give out your phone number or home address. This is particularly important to remember if you have a personal online journal or blog elsewhere.

3. Again, your blog is a public space. And if you put it on the Internet, odds are really good that it will stay on the Internet. Always. That means ten years from now when you are looking for a job, it might be possible for an employer to discover some really hateful and immature things you said when you were younger and more prone to foolish things. Be sure that anything you write you are proud of. It can come back to haunt you if you don’t.

4. Never link to something you haven’t read. While it isn’t your job to police the Internet, when you link to something, you should make sure it is something that you really want to be associated with. If a link contains material that might be creepy or make some people uncomfortable, you should probably try a different source.

Look over the guidelines and add your own, if you like, in the comments section below this post. I think these teacher’s suggestions are excellent. We’ll be using the above as a basis for how we will use our blog.

Take Care,
Mr. Crockett

Poster PDF

We met with Xian this morning to discuss direction of our Hydrogel Particle research. Last week we reserved time to use the confocal microscope but will not be able to use it because the training supervisor will be on vacation. The purpose of using the confocal microscope was to prove that we had truely oxidized our hydrogel particles.

In order to do this we would have stained our particle with Blue Hydrazide. Hyrazide reacts with Aldehyde functional groups so this is a good assay to test for oxidation. Even though we will not be able to complete the hydrazide assay, we can still prove the presence of Aldehyde functional groups by successfully forming Doubly Cross-Linked Network (DXN) hydrogels.

Our next step this afternoon will be to attempt to bond our HGP-OX to HAADH to form a DXN-Gel. Again, if a gal forms it will be a positive test confirming our successful oxidation of HGP. We are a lttle concerned about the success of this process because we did not immediatly cover the oxidation reaction with aluminum foil.

Yesterday we used the scanning electron microscope to view our HA- Hydrogel particles. It was wonderful to use such a technologically advanced machine… much more complicated and powerful than out schools light microscopes. The particles images came out well. A lot of the particles were bigger than the desired 0.9u size and we hypothesized that particle size main determinant was the magnetic stirrer. Since we used two stirrers and one worked faster than the other, we think the the slower stirrer produced the bigger particles.

Experimenting is always a fun filled learning experience. One would think that I would have thought to be cautous of the Acetone vapor pressure build up in our sample tube but I was not. When the lid came flying off with a POP! I was startled and a significant portion of our sample dripped onto the fume hood. Luckily, we made enough samples that this error should not effect our overall results.

In other news, Mr. Kampista was very helpful in getting my edublogs webpage together. It was frustrating making new blogs for each of my classes that could have their passwords, but we are there now. It should be cool for each class to have their own webpage to posts blogs in! Since I am the administrator of the webpages, any blog post a student writes will have to be approved by me first before it can be published. I like that

System based on Small Hydrogel Particle ( HGP Diameter about 0.9um)

1. Prepare 20 0.4mg samples of HA Hydrogel.

2. Oxidation of HGP0.9 to generate -CHO Aldehyde Functional Groups.

3. Conduct Cascade Blue Assay to prove presence of -CHO group.

4. Conduct Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) image of HGP0.9

5. Perform double Cross Linking (DXN) between HPP0.9 and HA-ADH.

6. Perform Torsional Wave Analysis (TWA) of swollen gel. 

Th last couple of days we have been working on adding aldehyde( C-OH) functional groups to our small particles. This was achieved by oxidizing the HGP’s( Hydrogel Particles) with NaIO4. The reaction was carried out by adding an equal molar ratio and constant stirring in the dark overnight.

In order to stop the oxidation reaction we added 17mg of Ethylene Glycol or equal molar volume of NaIO4. The Ethylene Glycol reacts with the NaIO4 thus stopping the oxidation of the HA HGP’s.

Next we washed and centrifuged the oxidized HA hydrogel particles ( oxHGP) with water, ethyl alcohol and acetone three timess each for a total of nine washes.

The last couple of days I have spent many hours trying to figure out how to navigate around Edublogs in an attempt to make my site work the way I want it to. As stated in a previous post, I want to be able to use my Edublogs website as a place where my students can not only make comments on the site but also create their own posts. The benefit of having students do their own posts is to allow students the use of multimedia tools which are not available via comment.

My hope is that students will not only write text in this posts but also upload pictures, video, diagrams and create hyperlinks. Sounds good right, well I had a bear of a time trying to figure out how to make this happen. Apparently its as simple as adding a new user to the administrators blog. This involves creating a new username and linking it to an email address.

My plan now is give all of my students this generic username and password. Since I am the administrator of the blog I will be able to review student posts before they are published. I still have a lot of work to do on making my blog site look and feel the way I want and to make it make effective for student posts. At this point I am very relieved to see that the student blogging idea can work!

Magnetic stirring HA-small particle

Centrifuge chamber

Centrifuge machine 12,000 rpm for 10 min

We washed our small HA-Gel particle with Acetone, di water, Ethanol, and finally acetone. Each type of wash was done three times for a total of twelve washes in all. We had a few problems during the centrifuge process. First, the centrifuge lid decided it did not want to close and lock. This closed us down on Friday. When we came in on Monday the centrifuge was fixed and we were back in business.

The challenge today has been to keep our centrifuge tubes intact. Early in the process today we found tubes to vbe cracked and leaking. Possible causes for the cracking could have been adding to much liquid to the tubes and that the tubes were old and unstable.

1. DELAWARE STANDARD #1: NATURE AND APPLICATION OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

2. OBJECTIVE: Teach students the technology of Internet blogging to create a interactive multimedia learning environment for students to create and develop Marine Biology topical themes.

3. MATERIALS/ METHODS: Students will access the teachers Marine Biology blog page and provide comments in the form of topic reviews, test questions, and  lab reports.

4. PROCEDURE:

  A.       EACH NIGHT A STUDENT WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR A SECTIONS WORTH OF MATERIAL: THEY WILL BE GIVEN A QUIZ GRADE BASED ON THEIR PERFORMANCE ON THE TASK AT HAND…. SAY 40 PTS. I WILL DEVELOPE A RUBRIC FOR THE STUDENTS TO USE WHILE DEVELOPING THEIR NOTES FOR THE CLASS:

1.      ACCURATE NOTES IN STUDENTS OWN WORDS… NOT COPIED FORM THE BOOK.

2.      LENGTH OF NOTES

3.      RELEVANT AND CURRENT RESEARCH ON THE TOPIC

4.      PICTURES

5.       REVIEW QUESTIONS: MULITIPLE CHOICE, FILL IN THE BLANK, CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS

B.        HOMEWORK WILL BE BASED ON THEIR CLASSMATES BLOGS.

C.       END OF THE WEEK QUIZES AND TESTS WILL HAVE BLOG QUESTIONS ON THEM.

D.       EACH CLASS WILL DO THEIR BLOG IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER: I WILL PRE- PRINT A LIST OF STUDENTS AND THEIR SECTION THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR. This way students will have plenty of time work on their blog entries.

E.       STUDENTS WILL HAVE THE SECTION THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR AND THE DATE THE BLOG ENTRY IN DUE ON A PRINTED SHEET OF PAPER.

F.    LABS:

1.       STUDENTS WILL WORK IN LAB GROUPS: Students will work in assigned lab groups based on their rows. They will be asked to complete their lab reports via blog. Each lab group member will take turns writing the lab report for the group online, but every group member must turn in a paper copy.

5. ASESSEMENT: Students will be assessed in two ways. First, students will be graded based on their success in adhering to the rubrics provided for their blogs. Secondly, students will be assessed by completing a pre and post blogging survey to determine their knowledge of blogging technology before and after a units worth of material.