ISE in Greece

This has been a great week and full of new experiences.  It is very encouraging to meet with fellow teachers in Europe and find that we have a lot of similar goals and desires for science education.  They have a great foundation set up with ISE to lead to lots of future collaboration between not only the EU but also with teachers here in the US.  There is some learning curves needed to bridge the gap between how they phrase things and approach things versus our American methods.  When you get past the initial phraseology and such then you see that there are many similarities.  We should look at inviting some of them back to the US and look at what we are doing also so that we can combine all of our best practices.  We have learned a lot about the universe this week and many new ways to use telescopes and web interactions that I look forward to bringing back and sharing with collegues in the States.  The ISE portal is an excellent method for presenting student driven projects and inquiring learning that has been created by the teacher and then given to the students to work through on their own and still have teacher driven questions and guidance to a little or a lot.  This is something that I will be using in my classroom.  The time to also experience some of the Greek culture was also a once in a lifetime experience that I encourage more people to take advantage of in the future.