Weekly Reading #6

“So he created an assignment where students made short informal speeches about familiar topics and then took questions from the audience.”


I really liked that the instructor made this assignment to help students with their public speaking. When I was doing my student teaching at North Marion High School I had a class that was co-taught with another student teacher. SInce neither of us were using the Biology/Chemistry class for our action research we decided to do something new to us, a PBL (Project Based Learning) unit. At the end of our PBL we had students do a presentation and it would have helped to do that informal speech assignment to get the students more prepared and comfortable presenting. I hope that for my next PBL or other assignment with a presentation component.


http://www.techtimes.com/articles/16147/20140922/winds-of-change-no-breeze-may-play-havoc-on-insect-food-chain.htm



1. The author of this article is Rhondi Lee with Tech Times. The purpose of this article is to show that climate change will affect a lot more smaller factors that can pile up and change food chains.


2. What drew me into this article was the title: Winds of change: No breeze may play havoc on insect food chain. This might not be catchiest title, but it seemed intriguing to me. I really just wanted to know how it would play havoc on the insect food chains.


3. I think that most people will see this as only affecting the insect food chains, but if the insect food chains change then it will intern change all the food chains because insects are large source of food for larger animals. If there is suddenly more of one type of insect in an area the predator for that insect will also increase in population in that area, thus changing the food chain in that area.


4. This article is from a scientific point of view and that climate change is happening, some may believe that it is not. It is about a study that was conducted with one area having the wind blocked to simulate climate change and an area with regular wind.


5. As far as I can tell it doesn't seem like there is any related information that was omitted from this article. I think it should have more information about how much the wind has slowed and is slowing in the form of a graph to show how fast this is happening.



Deconstruction will help students have a better understand of the article because they will have to look into the article much more than they ordinarily would. This will also help students find bad science, making sure the logic with the study is sound and that it makes sense what they are doing.