Lab Crawl Workshops 2008
2008 Lab Crawl Presentation
Download Pat Dixon's presentation,
The Power of Notebooks (PowerPoint file, 700 KB).
As Big Bend residents, we are surrounded by working scientific laboratories. Local scientists, often at the leading edge of their fields, research nearly everything from alligators to zooplankton. This rich environment serves as the perfect backdrop to the summer Lab Crawl workshop series for teachers.
The unique Lab Crawl workshops, offered to Leon County educators at no cost in 2008 for the second year in a row, were focused around two main objectives: adding to a teacher's background knowledge of concepts taught in their classrooms, and helping them translate that material into a variety of classroom activities for students K-12.
Teachers sort and catalogue macroinvertebrates to assess the health of Bear Creek Educational Forest during the 2007 Lab Crawl.
The 2008 workshop was expanded to two sessions. Each morning, participants were taken to a working research lab, where they engaged in different aspects of the research being conducted at each institution. Following lunch, participants worked on translating the day's experience into classroom lessons and activities. Participants received a stipend from Leon County Schools, a set of materials to do the activities in their classrooms and the chance to earn 30 in-service points.
The first of the Lab Crawl workshops took advantage of the following working laboratories in the Big Bend area: the Mag Lab (MRI research), Bear Creek Educational Forest (stream health assessment), Florida State University's geology department (isotopic dating of rocks) and FSU's Antarctic Core Research Lab (atmospheric and global climate research).
The second workshop of the Lab Crawl series, following the same format of Lab Crawl 1, took participants to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (real CSI techniques and capabilities), the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (food safety/quality research and testing), Dr. Erickson's Paleobiology Lab (dinosaur and reptile research), and two electron microscope research facilities (a comparison between a privately funded and a publicly funded lab).
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For more information, contact Pat Dixon at pdixon@magnet.fsu.edu or (850) 644-4707.
Classroom Outreach
