Teaching with Technology » spreadsheets

Campus Tree Map – Tim Parsons

Carrie Macfarlane — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:40:34 +0000

Who: Tim Parsons, Horticulturalist

Technologies used: Hardware: Dell Axim Handheld PC with a Bluetooth GPS; Software: Handheld PC running ArcPad; Desktop: ArcEditor, ArcPad, ArcPad Application Builder, Microsoft Excel, Access, and Visual Studio, Google Earth and Picassa 3.

Assistance Received: Tim received assistance with ArcGIS from Bill Hegman, GIS Specialist; and Katie Clagett and Chris Rodgers, former GIS Interns at LIS. He also received some help from students in the Geography Department’s computer lab.

Courses: BIOL 1003, Trees and the Urban Forest, and other classes in the Biology Department.

Reasons for using the Technology: The tree map is used primarily as a management tool but it has been central to a number of curricular projects as well. The map is viewable in Google Earth. Many commercial software packages are available for urban forest management, but they cost thousands of dollars and are not open enough for sharing data.

All of the urban campus trees (trees managed as individuals) are mapped. In classes, the map is used by students interested in finding and/or analyzing tree species. In Facilities Management, the map is used to track tree maintenance and health issues, for example pruning and insect problems. See Campus Tree Map Updated in The Middlebury Landscape blog for details.

In Tim’s Urban Forest class, his students took the tree population and ran it through modeling software called iTree to look at carbon sequestration, pollution abatement, etc. Students in other classes have used the map for tree identification. For example, a student recently contacted Tim because she was looking for Cherry trees to evaluate for a plant community ecology class.

Learning Outcomes: The tree map, at least in the Urban Forest class, turned out to be a good introduction to mapping for students without any GIS or Geography experience. In addition, Tim considers ArcPad a valuable learning resource; he sees it as ArcMap Lite, with much less of a learning curve than ArcView.

Description: The tree map of the campus was started years ago as a student project (see the Geography Department’s Student Projects page). Tim picked up the project again in 2006. After successfully applying for an environmental grant for the hardware, Tim went out in the field to verify and correct the trees that had been identified and add more. With help from the Geography Department and LIS, Tim created a map in ArcGIS which included attributes such as sizes and health status of the trees.

Tim maintains and updates the map and accompanying file geodatabase as the campus landscape changes. Meanwhile, he also has exported the map from ArcView to Google Earth using a free ArcGIS add-on called Export to KML. He plans to revise his ArcPad data collection forms so that they are are more specific to plant care needs.

The project has evolved through time. Last fall, Tim worked with students in a Plant Biology class. They mapped about half of the Bread Loaf campus trees, and he hopes to finish that project next fall. Tim’s future plan is to establish a virtual tree tour online, either with Google Earth or a static map.

Online Placement Exam – Prof Nancy O’Connor

Alex Chapin — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:10:51 +0000

All the Language departments and Language Schools at Middlebury require students to take a placement exam before enrolling in language courses or programs in order to ensure students take courses at a level appropriate to their knowledge of the language they want to study. Amongst language departments, the Spanish department was the first to create an online version of their placement exam in a web application referred to as Measure. Prof. Nancy O’Connor used the Spanish department exam as a guide for developing an exam for students of French.

The exam contains about 90 questions, most of which are either multiple-choice or cloze type questions, and progresses from easier points of grammar — verb conjugation in the present, possessive and demonstrative adjectives — to more difficult ones — choice between past tenses, use of the conditional and the subjunctive. There is a section to test reading comprehension, consisting of questions concerning a short text. The exam is configured to allow students to access the questions only once and has a time limit of 1 hour 15 minutes. Student answers are saved to a database and scores can be exported into a spreadsheet. Results from this exam determine what level courses students are allowed to take at Middlebury.”

Extending the Textbook – Prof Kyoko Davis

Alex Chapin — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:57:52 +0000

Prof. Kyoko Davis has never been fully satisfied with the audio resources included with any of the textbooks used by the Japanese dept. The Japanese dept currently uses Genki, An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. To supplement the audio resources that accompany this textbook, Prof. Davis has recorded additional audio material for students, some of this audio contains material from the textbook that is not in the accompanying resources, some contain alternative versions that are presented at a faster and/or slower pace and some contain supplementary material.

One area of study that Prof. Kyoko has focused on is vocabulary instruction. She has worked with Media Services to record hundreds of vocabulary items and used a spreadsheet to document all the metadata for each item including Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji representations of a given word, its English translation, grammatical categorization and information about lessons it appears in. All of this information was then imported into a database that was accessed by a web application she helped design for vocabulary study that allows students to specify items they know and don’t know, tracks their study habits and generates quizzes customized to their particular knowledge of the items studied.

Technologies:

Uses » Audio » Record/edit/format audio, Share audio on the web

Tools » Audacity, Voice Recorders, Microphones, iPods