Development process

We've defined all fields for the database for each of the three levels of participation. This exercise of course brought to light areas of stickiness and uncertainty and struggle.

Lisa Austin's students from Mahoney Middle School in South Portland weighed in on our ongoing paper-or-plastic-in-the-field discussion.

Little tiny piece of paper poll question: Would you rather collect data on paper or computer?

Maine DEP has posted on its website definitions of "exotic nuisance alien invasive species and native indigenous species."

Our teachers are in the midst of transforming the fledgling resources wiki into a useful community tool.

Look what's new!

Pete Thayer of the Department of Marine Resources (and the Maine Marine Invasive Species Working Group) called this morning to find out the latest on Vital Signs.

We're digesting a delicious meeting with our Teacher Advisory Group (held Friday 11/14/08 at GMRI with 11 teachers in attendance).

We used a "speed dating" approach to get our teachers chatting. Burning program development questions were on tap.

10 of 13 teachers from our August Institute (plus Ruth(!), our longest standing Vital Signs teacher) returned to GMRI today as Vital Signs Teacher Advisors.

In 15 minutes I trained 5 GMRI educators & community types (citizen scientists perhaps?!) to collect Vital Signs data. The training site was the grass field behind GMRI, so we used our imaginations to screen a quadrat for loosestrife, catch crayfish in a stream, and pull submersed plants from a pond.

I pulled together 4 sets of equipment and sent them on their way. They are heading to their backyards and to places of interest to gather information that'll chub up the database.

Had a great conversation with Diana, Dana, Misty, and Heather following the marathon test in Sanford. Highlights:

* Vital Signs tasks transcend technology. We were thrilled to hear Diana say that the data entry and visualization tasks were more interesting to her students than the technology. She was pleased to see students focused on VS rather than on using their new iBooks, and that they only asked for help a few times.