Tuesday July 1

Hi all, Southwest here! Just wanted to update everyone on our process during this third week. It has been a bit of a slow push for us down here back at our site. David Buse got back into town so we spent most of Monday getting him up to speed on all of the different information we received over the past 2 weeks as well as our large range of ideas for the project. David did amazingly well for the amount of information we through at him and is adapting perfectly to the ideas we have for next year. We are excited as a group to get started on mapping out the project and all the scientific aspects David can bring to the table. He has offered us so many tools today to introduce the heart anatomy to our english, math and tech classes without getting "too scientific." I know that these video demonstrations are going to be the ideal way for our students to grasp our overall concept before they break out into their specific content.

David also shared the QUEST method that he has been studying. This is a way for our students to become more observant so that they can develop comparative questions based on what they are discussing. I immediately saw how I can bring this into my math content throughout the year. We, as a group, have really taken to the idea that we want to create a frame or base for our students to "catapolt" off of when creating their projects. We want them to formulate questions that will interest them enough to create experiments to test their hypothesis. From there they will uncover the data to see if they can find answers to those questions. Once they have found all of their information we want them to use their creativity to show us how they want to share and present their findings to the public. These are just some of the topics we were discussing and how we want our students to create 95% of this product with the 5% being the tools we can give them and the basic topics we want them to use along the way. Of course, we are hoping that they will come up with ideas that we never thought of to incorporate into their project... but that is another day.

p.s. - attached is the pdf on the QUEST method (page 3)

Lastly, the ability to work with students this week is a bit of a struggle for us. We are unfamiliar with the students we will have next year, our gear up students are involved in another project, and are abilities of "persuasion" are running thin as our students rather be at the beach (as would I) during their summer vacation than in a practice session of cyberbridge. However, we have a small number of truly motivated and interested students that we are working with to get them tech-ready for the project. As we introduced the entire CyberBridge project for the year is was great to get immediate responses from the students as to what they think about the project and how we could get even more buy-in during the year. A few students gave us further suggestions that we could use. Overall, we are doing our best to meet the needs of our group during this last week.

Our goal for the next 2 days is to focus on the individual subject matter projects that we are going to give our students and how we can meet those needs as we discuss our budget and availability of materials. We will focus on a pacing chart that incorporates all of our subject content and making sure that we will be giving enough time for each project, as well as, it meeting the needs for our final product. This project is growing at an exponential rate and we are excited for the year to start.