Miscellaneous activities

16 June 2014

For my weekly blog----

I really enjoyed the class last week on Diversity, etc. The students were engaged and there was great discussion. Thanks! Wednesday's class on evaluation should be good to--it is a really important component of ISL. I went ahead and nominated someone for UF President. Not sure what will happen, but at least I felt that I tried to be part of the search process.

This evening I was interviewed on a TV show for the Gainesville market about the Panama Canal Project. When I get a picture and more details, I'll let you know. It was fun, and the host, Ilene Silverman, was very gracious.

On Thursday, I'm going to talk about fossils to Callum's summer classes at the FL Museum. This should be fun. About 45 enthusiastic fossil kids.

Then I'm off for a week's vacation and family reunion at a house on a lake in TN, north of Knoxville. I'm probably going to go through internet withdrawal because I heard the connection in the lake house is not so good, and this is one of the few places where Verizon is not so good. What will I do? If it is bad for me, it is likely worse for my three grandsons, so we will all be in the same boat together (as they say).

On July 1st I'm working with UF's CPET (Center for Precollegiate Education and Training)  to do a module on fossil horses, paleontology, and evolution. There will be 10 high-school teachers from Florida. I'm looking forward to working with them, and hope perhaps that we can develop a lesson plan that could be a model for studying horse evolution.

One of our graduate students, Claudia Grant, is organizing a pilot workshop for teacher PD for 3D scanning and printing of fossils. This, coupled with the recent article in the Gainesville Sun, makes 3D S&P all the more relevant. We also have partnered with iDigBio to develop a workshop on 3D S&P for "downstream users," including teachers and members of fossil clubs, to be held in 2015. All good stuff!

I will try to update this blog with photos as they are available.