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MnCOSE14 Strand Speakers

Each of our conference strands features a keynote speaker focused on the strand!

ElementaryBiologyChemistryEarthPhysics

  

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Elementary Strand Speaker - Kathleen O’Donnell, Director, Family & Education Services, Twin Cities Public Television.

"Making the Most of PBS LearningMedia ™"

As America’s largest classroom, PBS is the #1 source for educational media for students and educators. PBS LearningMedia™ is expressly designed for educators, PreK-16. This FREE service brings together the BEST of public media digital content from award-winning programs like NOVA, Nature, SciGirls, Sid the Science Kid, along with content from 90+ contributors, including NASA, National Public Radio, and The Learning Registry. We’ll unpack this classroom-ready tool, highlighting those features that will help you personalize and customize the experience, make lesson-planning easier, and enrich your own professional development.

Kathleen O’Donnell, tpt’s Director of Family & Education Services, leads tpt’s commitment to be the most valuable media service to children, youth, and the adults who care about them by fully deploying public media resources on-air, online, and in local communities. O’Donnell’s 25-year career has built and sustained impactful programming and professional development in the areas of early childhood and youth development, college access, media-based resources, and school-family-community partnerships. A licensed Minnesota parent educator, O’Donnell has overseen multi-stakeholder, integrated services in both St. Paul and Minneapolis Public school districts, and just before coming to tpt, through The Minneapolis Foundation’s Destination 2010 initiative. Her passion for closing the persistent opportunity gaps rooted in racial and economic disparities guide her work which includes resource development and quality systems policy and practice to promote successful P-16 pathways. For more information about tpt’s Family and Education Services, including media resources for the classroom and professional development, visit tpt.org/learn.

Biology Strand Speaker – Chris Pannell University of Minnesota

Cancer 101:  When Good Cells go Bad

http://www.micab.umn.edu/faculty/Pennell.html

Cancer affects us all, either directly or indirectly. This presentation will provide historical and cutting-edge information on how cancer affects us, how it arises, and how it is treated. Comparisons between conventional and personalized therapies will be presented.

He is currently researching ways to devise novel immune-based strategies for cancer therapy. Currently he and his colleagues are focusing on two approaches. One is to develop plasmid DNA-based cancer vaccines. The second is to introduce antigen receptors into T cells to redirect their cytotoxicity to tumor targets.





Chemistry Strand Speaker – Matt Morgan – Hamline University

What to Do If Your Flipped Classroom Flops.”

If you have tried flipping your chemistry classroom and it didn’t work, don’t despair! The hints and discussion in this talk may help.

Dr. Matt Morgan grew up in Anderson, a small town in Northern California  He began teaching at Hamline University in 2007, and was appointed to a full-time position as Senior Lecturer in 2009. Morgan is active in the American Chemical Society and is currently serving as Chair of the local section.

Morgan’s teaching duties include General Chemistry lecture and lab classes along with Hamline’s Chemistry and Society course. Chemistry and Society is aimed at students who are not science majors He encourages students to increase their critical thinking skills, becoming scientifically literate citizens and voters. He incorporates educational technology such as student response devices, online homework, and automated laboratory data acquisition in all of his courses. Morgan teaches a hybrid online version of Chemistry and Society that serves as a model for presenting scientific material, including laboratory exercises, in an online format.


 

Physics Strand Speaker – Tom Brown Mankato State University

Tom Brown is originally from Grand Forks, ND, where his love for science and mathematics was carefully tended by inspiring high school teachers.  He stayed in Grand Forks and received his BS in Physics from the University of North Dakota.  Tom moved to Montana to ski and fish and hopefully get a MS degree in Physics.  The plan was always to return to North Dakota, get a teaching license and try to fill the shoes of those amazing teachers he had as a teenager.  Failing utterly in his goals, Dr. Brown instead received his PhD from Montana State in Bozeman with a research interest in Physics Education. Now at MSU Mankato, he has found that teaching at the college level is quite rewarding and has no plans to change courses soon.

In his presentation he will discuss the guiding philosophies of 20th Century Educational Psychology as presented by the three main figures of the time: Dewey, Vygotsky, and Piaget.  Along the way we discuss the implications of these theories on curriculum and pedagogical design in the physics classroom.  "Let the Experts be the guide" is the theme of the session and the participants will work collaboratively to design what we imagine these three foundations of modern Ed Psych would have our Physics classes look like.




Earth Science Strand Speaker – Bryce Hoppe

Title:  Lessons from the Edge of the Living World

Summary:  The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Expedition 329 sailed from Tahiti in September of 2010 to recover and characterize the organisms that live in the deadest place on the surface of the Earth:  The seafloor of the South Pacific Gyre.  Over the course of the next two months, the team of 36 international biologists, chemists, physicists and geologists found sparingly rare communities of prokaryote and eukaryote microbes that appear to have lived buried in the seafloor for tens of millions of years in unchanged states of existence.  Although their environment was changing physically and chemically, the microbes adapted to living on virtually no food or energy and developed life spans that could well be thousands or tens of thousands of years in length.  From fighting cancer to supporting space travel, the implications of these findings are broad and far-reaching.  This talk summarizes the investigative methods and a sampling of the results of Expedition 329.  The talk intends to illustrate how cooperation among earth scientists of every stripe is needed to fully characterize the Earth’s environments and truly unravel the mysteries of life on this planet.


Bryce Hoppie is originally from Glencoe, Minnesota, and lived there back in the day when all the kids on the morning school bus still smelled a little bit like a milking parlor.  Taken by his father, a teacher, on summer vacations to Cascade volcanoes, Rocky Mountains glaciers, Appalachian ridges and valleys, and eroded rocky Acadian shores, it was only a matter of time before he became a teacher and a geologist.  Now at MSU Mankato, Hoppie teaches the full spectrum of geology classes from introductory classes for nonbelievers to those designed for geology majors that necessarily include complicated chemistry and calculus.  His research includes work as both a hydro-geologist working on projects for public agencies and private companies that are trying to reclaim the Minnesota waters we previously fouled through (now) illegal business practices.  His affinity for water extends to the world’s oceans and studies of the biogeochemistry of seafloor sediments—in hopes of better understanding Earth’s history, the role of current human activities on the environment, and the future of life on this planet.