User:Dmccabe

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The view from the Saint Michael's College campus in April

Biology in elementary schools | Instant wiki maker | Editing_tips | Contributors_page | WikiEducator Statistics | Talk with Declan

Date & Time : 28, August 2008 05:54

Why I'm here

Declan McCabe
Website:http://personalweb.smcvt.edu/dmccabe/
Employer:Saint Michael's College(Vermont; USA).
Occupation:Associate Professor of Biology
Nationality:American of late
Country:USA
email
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Wikieducator simultaneously serves the greater good and meets the learning objectives of my course. Serving the greater good is made clear by Wikieducator's statement of purpose and is eminently compatible Saint Michael's College mission. The primary learning objectives of my Biology in Elementary Schools course include fostering the integration of biology into elementary school curricula by encouraging collaborative development of hands-on teaching materials. Any wiki would facilitate collaboration, but this wiki is specifically geared toward building and sharing educational materials. I see this site as a long-term repository for my student's work, and a place where they may be built upon by others.

About Me

When I'm not teaching my Biology in Elementary Schools course I also teach General Biology, a course on Biological Reading and Writing, and an upper level course in Community Ecology. I'm a community ecologist and most of my research is in freshwater environments. I work on aquatic invertebrates including zebra mussels. I have a particular fondness for caddisflies.

I live with my wife and three wonderful children near the Winooski River in Vermont.

My interests

I'm interested in:

  • Most things biological
  • Maps
  • Camping
  • Working with my son's cub scout group where I try out some of the teaching ideas my students share here.
  • Working with my daughter's girl-scout group on merit badges and the like.

Other things

Help:Contents A nice editing sheet developed by some Boy scouts: Editing_tips

My Website and contact particulars

My infrequently edited website. My more useful site where I share about three hundred data sets previously published (by others) on species presence and absence on islands. The data include source citations and a link to some free software that can be used to do null model analysis. It may be of interest to teachers of community ecology.

Email: dmccabe@smcvt.edu

Today's Statistics for WikiEducator

Today is : 28, August 2008

You are watching these Stats at World Time

  • 5,283 users
  • 7,113 articles
  • 10,116 files
  • 195,628 edits
  • 14 administrators


My primary Wikieducator project

Biology in elementary schools is my student's ongoing wiki project. A new group of students will work on this project each year between January and early May.

Project history

I spent the Spring Semester of 2007 working with a group of future teachers from our Education Department on teaching ideas for science in Elementary schools. They uploaded their ideas to a wiki. A desire to build a long-term teaching resource for my students brought me in several steps to the wiki. Initially I intended to simply have students build a binder of ideas to be distributed after the semester. However, remembering my various moves from city to city, school to school, at the student stage of my life, I felt that the binders would in some cases have been lost before use. So I considered building a traditional web site. Because my students work in teams I wanted to avoid the version creep inherent in working from several computers. The wiki site cures that problem and offers several other advantages.

I have moved all of the content to Wikieducator and thirty six student teachers worked here in Wikieducator in the Spring of 2008 with a brand new set of ideas. Here is what we have so far. All hands-on science ideas on the site have been tested by elementary school students from our partner schools at least once.

Other projects

Time-lapse lake turnover video

Kaltura

My sandbox

How I made this user page

I copied the code from User:Dennis (thanks Dennis) who knows how to do these things! Then I played with it in the sand box until my content replaced his. And Dennis, when he improved his site, actually came over here and did the same for me. Thanks again; I think you'd just have to call that the wiki spirit.
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