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Camp Internet Expedition 5 - Briefing 2
Welcome to an exploration of the amazing natural forces that have shaped the California Channel Islands. This week the Camp provides an overview of the major geologic forces that have created the mountains, islands, and undersea canyons of the Channel region. After exploring this over view with your students, we recommend having each student - or team / clan of students - Adopt a Channel Island. We have materials available for studying the specific geology of each island, and by Friday, the students or clans should be able to report back to their fellow class members the specific geologic characteristics for their chosen island - essentially a geology show-and-tell. With eight islands to study, please be sure that at least one class member covers every one of the islands.
The interactive activity this week will be a geology and paleontology treasure hunt on Friday the 22nd between 8am and 2pm. Please write to camp@rain.org to confirm which 1-2 hour slot you would like to reserve for the treasure hunt. We will take at look a Pygmy Mammoth research around the world, and earthquake facts from regional universities.
The upcoming live online chat is being scheduled for the following week, which is the session on Astronomy. We will have several scientists available to share resources about Chumash Astronomy - how they studied and understood the night sky, and contemporary advances in astronomy taking place right beside the Channel where your students can ask an astronomer, via the Internet, to have a remotely operated telescope at UCSB capture an image from a specific coordinate in the night sky, and then see it posted in the Camp the next day ! As soon as dates and times are firmed up, we will let you know, and tentatively at least one of the chats will be Thursday, January 28th, 9-11am.
Other Activities:
For a behind the scenes report, the Camp Directors are busy this week meeting with the Sustainable Seas Expedition of National Geographic and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary to plan your participation in this historic expedition coming to the Channel this Spring for the first time. Their submersible will be traveling down to depths of 2,000 feet to see things no human eye has ever seen before - and we will be sharing their findings with you right here in Camp Internet.
This week also sees the Camp Directors making a presentation at a California Department of Education Technology Literacy Challenge grant bi-annual meeting. We are inviting the other Technology Literacy campuses to join us for the 5th California Channel Islands Symposium reporting and Sustainable Seas Expedition reporting that the Camp - and our student campers - will be making available online this Spring.
Virtual Science and History Fair:
Please let the students know that they need to begin planning to prepare an entry for the Camp Virtual Science and History fair. This will be an online gallery of student projects in the field of history, social studies, American literature, or the sciences, and will be seen by classrooms across the country as part of the Smithsonian Innovation Network. Classrooms can select their own topics, and work individually or in small groups to prepare visual and written - even video and audio - materials for sending into the Virtual Fair. Please have the students let us know what topic they will be working on, and we will suggest guest Trail Guides for them to confer with on their project if needed.
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