Plants

We looked at some cool ways to grow plants without soil yesterday. We discussed Hydro & Aquaponics and viewed quite a few examples of each. We used the awesome CoolIris 3D Wall addon for IE to view the image files on Google.

Today we planted our seeds. Everyone had the choice of flowers, veggies, and/or herbs to plant. We are germinating them hydroponically. We will be building Terrariums in our manufacturing unit in about a week. We will thereafter transplant the plants we started today into the terrariums. We will keep them in the Dome for a while to get them growing well, then students will be able take them home.

5 F's of Agriculture

Today we discussed the 5 F's of Agriculture: Food, Forestry, Farming, Flowers & Fabric. In the context of those 5 categories we discussed that fact that most of what we have is related to agriculture. We will be looking at some interesting ways of growing things and doing some planting of seeds in the next few days.

Get All You Can

Today Mrs. Hunt was in teaching a unit on teamwork from our Career Development Curriculum. Students played a game designed to show what I will call the flaws of human nature. Some migh not call them flaws. Students "competed" for something they all wanted. Greed and dishonesty got the best of most of the groups and caused them to get nothing. Here is link to the activity on the CTEI page at the USOE. If you missed this activity there is no way to make it up. There are no points associated with the activity, just a missed experience.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Today we did a cost/benefit analysis in class. Students were then given their own form to do one for homework. The general idea is to think through decisions completely before finalizing them and carrying them out. They should write down a decision in the space for it on the form. They may not use the choice to do or not do homework since we did that one in class. It needs to be written as something they will do or not do. Then they are to write down all the costs to making that decision and all the benefits of making that decision. The hard part is being honest with themselves. It is due tomorrow at the beginning of class.

Economics

Today we started discussing economics. We covered the Big 5 of Economics. Here is a link to a document similar to the one we used in or presentation. We defined Economics as the buying, selling and producing of commodities. We had a discussion of Credit and related it to our current economic situation. We will be doing a cost/benefit activity on Monday. All 3rd quarter work had to be in to me before I left school today.

Question Day

Every now and again I allow my students to ask me whatever is on their mind. Today we did that in class. We discussed this blog.... I am going to show everyone tomorrow in class. Today there weren't too many really good questions. I guess the 20 minutes we had weren't enough to get the thinking going. There was no assignment for students to turn in today.

Animusic

Today we viewed Animusic 1. This is a set of music videos created completely with CGI and MIDI. Students were required to takes notes during the videos recording track names and interesting things they noticed in each video. This activity is used to focus on graphic arts and computer graphics.

Today we worked on Biotechnology. Students were directed to to Biotechnology Lab website at the University of Utah. This is a great site to learn about what biotechnology is as well as learn about biotech issues like stem cell research. Students were required to do 3 activities and fill out a short worksheet as they went. It was due at the end of the period.

Biotechnology Research and Development is one of 5 biotech ares students are introduced to in CTEI. The other areas are Diagnostic Services, Therapeutic Services, Health Informatics, Support Services.

Start

This will be my Career and Technical Education Introduction blog. I will be putting assignments and other interesting stuff on here for my students to use.