BioEYES Newsletter
July, 2011
WHAT'S NEW Baltimore City What a great year we had! Our fearless leader, Dr. Farber, joined the STEM advisory board for the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS). Our three educators taught 3,431 students and 68 teachers, and we now have 6 Master Teachers. All told, we visited 53 schools; 42 of which are in BCPSS. We also delivered our two-week environmental program, Your Watershed, Your Backyard, to 4 schools and 226 students this past spring. We partnered with Blue Water Baltimore to engage those students in service activities including storm drain stenciling, a stream cleanup, and a butterfly garden planting. BCPSS has chosen four new schools to receive Your Watershed, Your Backyard in fall 2011. We can always use volunteers (and donations!) for our programs. Please contact Valerie Butler at 410-246-3004 or butler@ciwemb.edu if you wish to help out. Baltimore County BioEYES in BCPS has just wrapped up for the school year. This year was quite exciting as we were able to institute part of the Master Teacher program at 3 new elementary schools. I received some excellent feedback on how to make the program easier for Master Teachers as well as some great ideas for modifications to the
Hello BioEYES Supporter, The school year has come to a close and summer is here! BioEYES had another fantastic year delivering hands-on science outreach to schools in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and South Bend, Indiana. In the 2010-2011 school year our outreach educators taught 13,300 students and trained 187 teachers in 162 schools, and we had 46 BioEYES Master Teachers delivering the program independently with materials loaned from our parent institutions. Most of our educators teach in inner-city schools. Sometimes these classes are a challenge. But even in the worst of schools we have students who move to the front of the class to learn genetics lessons such as practicing Punnett square activities, or who tell us they never thought science could be so fun.
One of our Master Teachers presented BioEYES to her 7th grade class this past December. They had such a good time, they wrote some short messages to one of the founders of our program, Dr. Steven Farber, to express their thanks. Here's a small sample of what they said:
"Thank you so much Dr. Farber!!! I loved working on this experiment with fish. I am so intrested [sic] I want to do it with my family at home."
curriculum. I also had the chance to teach the High School program this year and the teacher was very excited as she stated her genetics test scores were higher than normal. We also piloted the new assessments create by UPenn and I am excited to say that it was quite a painless task. Students were able to take care of things quite well. At this year’s end BioEYES BCPS will have been to 42 schools reaching 3289 students, trained 8 new teachers while retaining 34, and worked with 10 master teachers. It was a great year and hopefully next year will be even better. It has been a pleasure working with everyone in the BioEYES program. I see really great things in store for the program and wish you all continued success. Philadelphia One of our partnering area high schools, University City High School Promise Academy, will be offering a 4 week researchfocused course this summer for their students. The course would be facilitated by a UCHS teacher, Shaikha BuAli along with 5 other UCHS teachers and offered to 60 rising 10-12th graders. The purpose of this course is to engage students with hands-on, inquiry-based experiments in a variety of STEM fields and help them build the research skills needed for their participation in the 2011-2012 Bridge to ReBIO program (UPenn student research program). The students will participate in BioEYES for a week in July. Along with learning about zebrafish, we will work with them on their research and journal writing technique, a skill necessary in science. The students will additionally participate in a physics, environmental and chemistry week. At the end of the course, the students will work in groups creating poster boards to present what they learned in the course.
"Dear Dr. Farber, I can't thank you enough for funding the lab that my fellow colleagues and I got to take part in. It was very exciting watching the eggs grow and hatch. Our [sic] even had fins! thank you so much for funding us."
"Thank you, Dr. Farber! I love using labs to learn about science, I find I learn best through them. This one was my favorite." Baltimore Outreach Coordinator and Educator Susan Artes reports the following story from this past spring: Your Watershed, Your Backyard (YWYB) Baltimore’s environmental stewardship program supported by The Chesapeake Bay Trust and the Roland Park Middle School Alumni Association, was up and running again this past spring. As part of the two-week program, we take 7th graders to several stream sites in their watershed. Here they see the accumulation of plastic and other trash carried into the streams by neighborhood runoff and they are astonished by the amount and familiarity of what they see. It’s the same soda cans and water bottles they use, the plastic grocery bags their families use, plastic rings from sodas, etc. As one of their activities, groups of 4 kids work together to fill their large trash bags and they really get into it. They carry their bags with them for the whole day, even refusing to leave them at the bus when taking the quarter-mile hike to the restrooms, "We might find trash on the way!" At one site students were astounded to see a gentleman from a nearby office building walking along the water’s edge filling his own garbage bag with trash. He told them he does this every day during his lunch hour because each of us has a responsibility to help keep the water clean. "What if everyone did this?" he asked. "Imagine the difference we could make." The kids were looking at each other and two girls said at the same time, "I could do this!" That’s what YWYB is all about.
Teachers also say that the students are bringing their enthusiasm outside of the classroom! One Baltimore City teacher told our BioEYES educator that during her parent-teacher night, coincidentally scheduled during the week or her BioEYES program, attending parents were primarily interested in finding out more about "the zebrafish thing they've been hearing about all week."
We are very excited about this new course and our involvement in it. Notre Dame Things are hoppin' here at the University of Notre Dame BioEYES. One exciting bit of news is that we had a record breaking fish cross at Mrs. Modlin's 6th grade class at LaSalle Intermediate Academy. Olivia and JoAndrea were the "Cupids" that picked out just the right male and female for this huge family of 487 embryos! We are currently putting together our 4th BioEYES Summer Institute - a week filled with new teachers participating in BioEYES, along with opportunities for performing modern biology lab techniques such as bacterial transformation and PCR. We also tour some research labs here on the ND campus. The teachers get an inside view of current research: zebrafish vision research, biochemical research on cow's brains, and the effect of radiation on metals - all right here in the teachers' back yards!
Did You Know? BioEYES is GuideStar approved! To see our listing, go here and look under the “Programs and Help” tab.
Just because it’s summer does not mean our work is done. We spend the summer months delivering special programming such as summer camps, fundraising, working on program enhancements, and other items we can’t find time for while teaching during the school year. It’s a lot of work but we love making a difference in children’s lives and therefore we love what we do! We'd also like to bid a fond farewell to two of our hardworking BioEYES educators: Jackie Anzaldo, the BioEYES Outreach Coordinator and Educator for the University of Pennsylvania, and Frank "Bo" Dunlap, BioEYES Educator and Resource Teacher for the Baltimore County Public School System. Jackie and Bo have both decided to move on to bigger and better things at the end of this summer. Both of them have provided invaluable contributions to BioEYES that go far beyond UPenn and BCPS and they will be sorely missed. Good luck to both of you, in all of your future endeavors! Finally, we would like to thank all of those who have contributed to making the past year of BioEYES such a success. Without all of the teachers, donors, volunteers, and of course students, we would never have been able to pull it off. Thank you, and we look forward to working with each of you again in upcoming years! Sincerely,
Dr. Steven Farber BioEYES co-founder and staff scientist Carnegie Institution for Science
Dr. Jamie Shuda BioEYES co-founder and Director of Life Science Outreach University of Pennsylvania
BioEYES currently operates out of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Baltimore, MD; the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA; Notre Dame University in South Bend, IN; and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. We have been able to deliver our programs to tens of thousands of children at no cost to their schools because of the generosity of individuals, foundations and corporations. For more information or to make a donation, please visit www.bioeyes.org. We thank you for your support!