BrianPlankis
02-01-2007, 11:17 AM
HIGH SCHOOL EXPERIMENT BEGINS TOMORROW!!!
I am VERY excited to announce that Project DIBS has received final permission from both the school district and the University of Houston to begin the Spring 2007 breeding experiment. Getting approval was a long and involved process and required a lot of effort to get everything lined up properly.
For those of you not familiar with the educational field, it is very difficult to get approval for any K-12 students to use an Internet discussion forum, due to some very real or perceived risks to the students. Because of this there are some rules that Project DIBS members will need to follow when interacting with the students. Some of rules below may sound harsh, but in order to get the students participating in the forums, I needed to tell the schools that we would have a safe forum environment for their students.
1. The students will be added to the Student usergroup which does not allow PMs or email communication. This is to protect the student identity and privacy. Absolutely NO ATTEMPTS should be made to contact the students privately, request a way to contact them personally or request information to try to figure out their identity. Any user that attempts any of these things will be immediately suspended and/or banned, no exceptions. I will be required to report that user to the school district as well. If you feel you have a reason to contact a student privately, please contact me by PM and I will forward your request to the school district and discuss it with the teacher.
2. You are encouraged to answer any student questions that come up in the regular discussion forums, but please keep your answers clean with no profanity or negative comments. Project DIBS members have formed a wonderful community so far, I really enjoy the atmosphere here and I would like the students to experience that as well.
3. Since this experiment is the basis for my candidacy paper for school, I will be restricting all of the experiment postings to one set of forums:
http://www.projectdibs.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=54
All Project DIBS registered users can see these forums, but only Project DIBS Educators will be allowed to post in the forums. One of the strengths of Project DIBS is the community here and I would like many members to respond to student questions so that they feel like part of the community. Obviously some of the questions will be school related and the teacher and I will handle those questions.
The students will be studying reproductive characteristics of the Columbellid sp. (http://www.projectdibs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29) of snail from the project. I encourage anyone who is currently breeding this snail to sign up as a DIBS educator and answer any questions the students may have about the snail or to share their experiences in breeding them.
Anyone that wants to post messages in the school experiment forums will need to register as a DIBS Educator and I will then send you an electronic copy of an informed consent form that you will need to print out, sign and mail back to Project DIBS. Due to university regulations I cannot make exceptions to this rule, but it is an easy process and I hope that many people will be willing to do this simple step. I will reimburse you for any postage via paypal for mailing the form back.
This is a very exciting project for the students and Project DIBS and I hope that many forum members will participate to make this an excellent community experience for everyone.
Brian
I am VERY excited to announce that Project DIBS has received final permission from both the school district and the University of Houston to begin the Spring 2007 breeding experiment. Getting approval was a long and involved process and required a lot of effort to get everything lined up properly.
For those of you not familiar with the educational field, it is very difficult to get approval for any K-12 students to use an Internet discussion forum, due to some very real or perceived risks to the students. Because of this there are some rules that Project DIBS members will need to follow when interacting with the students. Some of rules below may sound harsh, but in order to get the students participating in the forums, I needed to tell the schools that we would have a safe forum environment for their students.
1. The students will be added to the Student usergroup which does not allow PMs or email communication. This is to protect the student identity and privacy. Absolutely NO ATTEMPTS should be made to contact the students privately, request a way to contact them personally or request information to try to figure out their identity. Any user that attempts any of these things will be immediately suspended and/or banned, no exceptions. I will be required to report that user to the school district as well. If you feel you have a reason to contact a student privately, please contact me by PM and I will forward your request to the school district and discuss it with the teacher.
2. You are encouraged to answer any student questions that come up in the regular discussion forums, but please keep your answers clean with no profanity or negative comments. Project DIBS members have formed a wonderful community so far, I really enjoy the atmosphere here and I would like the students to experience that as well.
3. Since this experiment is the basis for my candidacy paper for school, I will be restricting all of the experiment postings to one set of forums:
http://www.projectdibs.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=54
All Project DIBS registered users can see these forums, but only Project DIBS Educators will be allowed to post in the forums. One of the strengths of Project DIBS is the community here and I would like many members to respond to student questions so that they feel like part of the community. Obviously some of the questions will be school related and the teacher and I will handle those questions.
The students will be studying reproductive characteristics of the Columbellid sp. (http://www.projectdibs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29) of snail from the project. I encourage anyone who is currently breeding this snail to sign up as a DIBS educator and answer any questions the students may have about the snail or to share their experiences in breeding them.
Anyone that wants to post messages in the school experiment forums will need to register as a DIBS Educator and I will then send you an electronic copy of an informed consent form that you will need to print out, sign and mail back to Project DIBS. Due to university regulations I cannot make exceptions to this rule, but it is an easy process and I hope that many people will be willing to do this simple step. I will reimburse you for any postage via paypal for mailing the form back.
This is a very exciting project for the students and Project DIBS and I hope that many forum members will participate to make this an excellent community experience for everyone.
Brian