I will be doing my first implementation during the week of December 17, so I'm not yet ready to let you know how it went. However, Carla suggested I post my plan to do so, and I can receive feedback once I do.
In the meantime, if any of you have done a lesson using Image J or done a variation on the ozone hole lesson from the EET chapter, I'd love to hear how it went for you. I might be able to use your experience to anticipate problems kids might have instead of reacting to them!
I'll be doing a lesson similar to that I did with the kids this summer--a general training on stacking, measuring, and thresholding on Image J, then using this to analyze the size of the ozone hole. I'll then have kids export this data into Excel to make a graph (which they should be able to do proficiently since Tracy has been working on the Excel piece in math class).

Amy:

Here's one glitch in the Ozone activity that you can watch out for: The ozone images have a horizontal line across them that doesn't always disappear on the first Despeckle command.

If someone adjusts the threshold and uses the wand tool, but only the bottom or top half of the ozone hole is highlighted, it's important to remove the selection first (by choosing the rectangular selection tool and clicking it on the image somewhere outside of the yellow outline) and invoke Despeckle again. If you despeckle again with the outline on, it only despeckles inside the selection, and the offending line won't disappear.

BTW, once your kids know some thresholding and measuring, they may want to apply it to sea ice images: we've recently posted a new EET chapter in which users examine how sea ice in the Arctic has changed over the past 30 years.

Good luck smiles,
LuAnn

LuAnn-

I am working on the directions for this right now. Thanks so much for the heads up.

Tracy

Hi Amy. If you read my post, you'll see some of the minor challenges I faced with the Ozone Hole implementation. Overall, it went well, but I found students wanted to spend more time on the lesson than I had planned. Also, make sure you have your "content ducks in a row" my kids had so many content questions about the subject. I was so worried about implementing the technology, I didn't anticipate the "science" part.

Jody

Hi Amy,
My kids have been asking quite a few questions about the ozone layer and how large the hole is and how it is changing. I would like to show them exactly what is going on. Is this the ozone lesson that was presented this summer at MIT? If so are you using the same images? Let me know how it went. I might be looking into making a stack of the images so the kids can see just how much the ozone is affected year after year.
Sue

Sue-

We used the same images as in the summer, but we got them back to 1979, which showed kids a much better trend. We downloaded all of them from the same link as the chapter has. If you send us your e-mail, we could probably e-mail them to you? It is too much to post here.

Tracy

Sue, Jody, and Luann,
Thanks so much for the helpful suggestions! I just finished day 3 of 4 on the project and it has been going ok with my class. We spent the whole day discussing ozone and relating it to the chemistry unit we just finished; I was indeed grateful that Tracy and I had spent time this summer trying to understand the chemistry, or I would've been unable to answer the questions!
Sue, we developed new worksheets with more guiding questions, along with an open-note quiz to see if the kids are getting it (we did use the Mona Lisa stuff from the group this summer--thank you!). If you haven't yet sent your email to Tracy, please do (or to me) and we'll send along all of these worksheets. That goes for anyone else interested, as well.

Luann,
Thanks for the heads-up on the line that appears. We did find that something weird happened; kids on different computers had to despeckle different numbers of times to get these images to work (some had to despeckle up to 5 times). Our computer teacher is mystified, as they all had the same version of Image J and the same computers, but as we just watched them despeckle, it was clear that one computer did something different than the computer next to it! Very confusing, and somewhat frustrating for the kids. This was only a problem for the 2006-7 images, which were in a different format.

OK, my last comment about the Ozone Hole discussion: this is very difficult to do with learning disabled kids if there is not an aide in the room. We have kids who just can't (or won't) follow clear, written directions, and whose attention challenges/auditory processing speed also prevent them from following guided instruction via the projected instructor display. We had the computer teacher in the room, who was very on top of the program, but even then, we had kids who would sit helplessly until they could be individually helped.

This is of course a larger problem with these kids, but if you have such clientele in your classrooms, I'd get as much adult help as you can before doing this. It was fun for most of the kids, but frustrating for this group of them, which I worry only reinforces some of the ideas about science and technology that we're trying to debunk!

I agree with Amy--this was very difficult for our really LD kids. The aide that comes around with them just sat there and said she didn't know how to use the program, so couldn't help them. All I could say is that she should follow the directions along with the kids--but she was too intimidated by the technology to do so. If I hadn't had the computer teacher there to help, this lesson would have been utterly impossible. As it was, I had some LD kids who did basically nothing at all. And I can't assign it as homework since they don't have the file and program at home--so now I have to let this behavior go without a consequence.

Our school district also is focusing on closing the achievement gap for African Americans and Latinos, and I was surprised by how really wide it is for simple computer skills like typing, finding files, drop and drag, etc. A much wider gap than I see in either math or science. The timing of the lesson was difficult because the computer saavy kids finished twice as fast as the others. Thankfully I had loaded a picture of my dog (an absurd looking Basset Hound) into the file folder and they got a kick out of decorating and animating her, rotating her head and other things. Ideally, it would be good to have some kind of challenge activity for them to do when they finish, since they had a lot of extra time on their hands.