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This is doctor tom Bridgeman and today I am gonna tell you about marine biology projects
coming up in half a term. This project will be worth 50% of your course grade or the points you will get 5 blog entries.
Due on Monday April 16th we are making it due so that it can be graded before the end.
A few guidelines. For the project: Basically the content should be appropriate
for a freshman level class. The effort that you put in should be equivalent to five blogs.
That's an hour or two for a blog, and then you should be spending at least 5-10 hours
on this project. And you will be looking at a log of this project so we will reward creative
and interesting projects with higher grades. So what are these projects about. Well you
can choose any marine biology topic that interests you. And that's what makes it exciting. If
you come up with a topic that you are interested in you will come up with a interesting project
and if its boring to you, your presentation and project will come up as boring. So find
something that you really like about marine biology. There's no restriction but if you
have any question or you are unsure email me or your teaching assistant. So some examples
of project types of projects that you might take up, one could be evolutionary relationships
for examples if you like the tree of life websites you could create a tree house. If
you are interested in conservation, you can look up green peace or sierra club, find out
their work and write about it. Work with them and find out about them. You could also do
something that is just hands on. You could take a field trip to an aquarium or a museum.
You can also start your own aquarium or museum. You could do all sorts of things. So here
are few examples. This is the Toledo zoo or the natural history museum in Ann Arbor. If
you live far away from Ann Arbor, you could take a virtual visit. It has webcams, it has
webcams and has interactive things that you could online. You can do all this and document
what you saw. You could start your own aquarium at home. Fresh or salt water. Put in invertebrate
or vertebrate organisms. You could investigate a conservation organization in your area.
For example a local chapter of something that works more preferably on aquatic habitats.
May be interview the head of the organization or go to one of their meeting. Documents that.
You could plan a scuba diving. Go through all the steps, where you wanna go , what time
you will go, with what company. What sorts of animal you wanna see. If you have children
you can take them on such a vacation. If you are interested in marine biology, you could
get a
book on marine biology and read it. Write a report on that. Sop whatever you can imagine.
And the further reading section of your textbook will be helpful in coming up with ideas. So
the main thing you do is to document. You have to present something. So it is much simple
to present something with photos and videos. Take a camera with you. Take a tape recorder
along with you. If you go to a museum take picture of everything. If you interview a
local conservation group, or a zoo keeper, record that either on video or in sound. Keep
a journal of what you are doing. May be your idea is to find the best seafood restaurant
in town. Go through and document that by writing it down. If you wanted to do something like
finding a good seafood restaurant. It needs more than just eating the food. Talk to the
waiters and the chef. Find out if they know where their seafood comes from. Do they know
if it's endangered or not. Are they finding it harder and harder to find certain types
of fish? Some of these things are there in our book. Of how we are over fishing our oceans.
It will be interesting to talk to the chef and find out if they know about it. Or if
they just buy the fish. Then you need to present the project in interesting ways. There are
a lot of ways to do it. For example you could do a YouTube videos. With soft puppets. You
could do a tree of life project, you could create a presentation, you could create a
Facebook page for the project or the class. Then everyone could join that page and add
to it. You could create a brochure of the area of the ocean you have to visit. Or you
could create PowerPoint presentation. Power point presentation are not very interesting
and engaging like you see right now. So you can do that too. So let me give you some examples.
For example the tree of life. If you are interested in doing a tree of life web project you could
go and visit the tree of life website and see, hers an example of a tree house. This
page is called a tree house and was created by a student for a course. You could make
a prezi. That is like PowerPoint presentation. But it's more like you are creating a large
poster and zooming around the parts of the poster. So here's an example of a prezi presentation.
When you make a prezi, you have to go to the prezi website and sign in but its free. And
it's really an interesting tool. You can do all sorts of things and you are basically
scrolling around this large page canvas zooming in zooming out, doing all sorts of things.
So this is an interesting way. It s more interesting way of making a presentation than just a simple
PowerPoint. You could visit an aquarium. This is a virtual
visit. For example the Montgomery aquarium. They have different webcams. Most of the times
they are always working. And you could watch live footage of the webcam from the open sea.
You can do something like sit there and document and everything you see or write about them.
May be do screen capturing. And there are other interactive things at some of these
website. You could set up your own aquarium and may be put a webcam. That would be interesting.
Or you could visit a museum and create a blog about it. For example a student who visits
a museum created this blog. So they went to the museum and put pictures as they went.
They talked about eh exhibit. Now this is a very basic one but you could do something
along these lines. You could do an interview or a visit a zoo, visit a zoo keeper. I found
this one online. This is a zoo keeper who works for sea otter. She is finding snow for
them and letting sea otters okay with it. If you have a video camera you could do something
like this. And finally you could make your own puppet show. I thought this one was pretty
interesting. This was probably a student project. So that is an introduction to the projects.
I hope you find this presentation useful. You can always email me question regarding
the project. But spring break will be a good time to start thinking about idea for the
project.