Leslie Ovard: Okay we’ll go ahead and get
started. You have joined the Operation BioenergizeME introductory webinar for the Fall 2014 BioenergizeME
Beta Test. Thank you for being here. This webinar is brought to you by the U.S. Department
of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office and staffed by my colleague Zac Peterson,
and me, Leslie Ovard. Next slide. Thank you for your interest in the challenge,
this challenge is intended to provide the tools and structure to foster an educational
dialogue a
bout how bioenergy can help diversify the American energy portfolio. Bioenergy comes
from plant material, or “biomass,” that has acted as a biological solar collector
and gathered energy in chemical form within its cells. Bioenergy has come a long way since
it was used by early humans in the form of fire for heat and light. Next slide. Over time, technologies had developed to harvest energy from biomass with increasing efficiency
in ways that help address environmental concerns. Many of the deci
sion about how bioenergy will
be integrated into the U.S. energy portfolio will be influenced by our young people. Many
young people haven’t thought much about bioenergy as a viable option for renewable
power, sustainable transportation fuel, or production of valuable bioproducts that are
currently produced from diminishing fossil-based resources, such as petroleum.
Operation BioenergizeME is an initiative to: 1. Increase access to reliable, science-based
information about bioenergy and, 2. Prov
ide tools for discerning the bioenergy
misinformation that arises in media and conversations. One of the tasks we’re asking of our BioenergizeME
beta testers is to help us select the most appropriate name for this challenge. It is
a research project on a science-related topic that is displayed in a visually-rich infographic
format. We believe students will be really- will find this format really fun, and a great
way to learn and share. But is something new, it’s not exactly a science fair, it is
an
infographic challenge. Please help us with your suggestions as we proceed. Next slide. One of the goals of this beta run is to provide educator with everything that they need to
easily incorporate the challenge into their course curriculums. We are providing a virtual
toolkit that includes challenge rules, research prompts, infographic development guidance,
and evaluation rubrics. We also are providing a resource library that was put together by
the Library of Congress. In the resource libra
ry, you’ll find research guidance for beginners,
and a virtual resource library that includes bibliographic information about useful texts
and also hotlinks to help students along the way. We’ll also be providing a media campaign
guide for those teams who’s infographics qualify for a national social media campaign.
We also have BioenergizeME staff to answer questions and gather feedback. The challenge
and tools provided are intended to help educators add bioenergy as a current affairs topic for
interdisciplinary discussion across the curriculum, from applied science courses in environmental
studies, biology, chemistry, to humanities courses in art, design, communications, history,
and even business. This activity focuses on two critical thinking skills: learning to
do rigorous research, and using social media strategically for a common good. Next slide. We intend to recognize participants, both educators and students. Recognition of- this
will occur through recognition of participants
and winners with official letters, from DOE
leadership. It also includes promotion of winning infographics on our national website,
and then recognition of the first place team at a national event. Participation recognition
is intended to be useful for students’ resumes and college applications, as well as educator
CVs. Next slide We’re going to cover the following in the
webinar; we’ll go over some introduction and background, including how to participate
in the webinar itself, a little bit ove
rview on the U.S. Energy Department’s Bioenergy
Technologies Office. We’ll show you a little bit of the materials we’re providing for
the challenger, including the virtual toolkit, talk a little bit about judging and review,
and our social media campaign, and go to a little bit of discussion about how to provide
feedback and ask questions as a beta test participant, and then open up the floor to
you for webinar question and answer. You’ll notice on this slide that there are a couple
of examples
of infographics. In this challenge, students will present their research findings
in the form of an infographic which we want to talk about a little bit later. Next slide. Okay, my colleague Zac Peterson has prepared some tips on participating in the webinar.
Zac go ahead. [technical difficulties] Are you muted Zac, I can’t hear you. [technical difficulties] Okay, Zac’s having a little bit of technical difficulties. Let me just emphasize some of
the things that he wanted to bring up. Webinar tip
s: if you call in using your phone, you’ll
have- that’s usually the best sound quality. When you’re not speaking, please mute your
phone. The webinar works best with Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. And then we ask
that you write down or submit questions or comments throughout the webinar, and then
we will address them together at the end. If you have any questions that you’re struggling
getting through the webinar format, please email Zachary Peterson directly, his email
address is on the sc
reen. Okay next Slide Zac: Leslie, are you able to hear me now?
Leslie: Okay I can, go ahead. Zac: Great, sorry about the technical difficulties
there. So Leslie definitely emphasized all the great points there. Also, for some of
you, just wanted to emphasize where things are on the webinar screen. The top image there
shows the control panel bar, so if you have any difficulties, or you need to send a chat
message to the staff, click that button, and it will open what you see in the bottom, the
c
ontrol panel there. Also make sure you put in your audio pin, you can see it’s highlighted
there in red in the bottom, so when we get to the webinar Q&A, if you don’t have the
audio pin, you won’t be able to speak, so make sure you put that in. And when we get
to the Q&A, you’ll be able to speak. So like I said, if you do have any questions,
feel free to enter them into the chat box there that you see now, and when we get to
the webinar Q&A, if you’d like to speak, please click this button with
the hand with
the arrow over it, and we’ll see that you stuck your hand up, and we’ll be able to unmute your phone, and we’ll be able to hear what you have to say. So that about covers it,
and like Leslie said, if you have any questions, feel free to shoot me and email, I’m monitoring
right now, and if you have any questions that you’d like to send to the chat box that’s
fine as well, we’ll get those recorded and towards the end, we’ll have some time to
discuss. Thanks. Leslie: Great, thanks Zac
. Okay, to our introduction,
providing a little bit of background. The U.S. Energy Department supports the Energy
Secretary, who serves the president as part of his advisory cabinet. Within the Energy
Department, the BioenergizeME Initiative is carried out within the Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy Program Office's Sustainable Transportation area. At the Bioenergy Technologies
Office, which we refer to as “BETO” or “B-E-T-O,” is the acronym. Through BETO,
the Energy Department is supporti
ng pilot and pioneer-scale bioenergy projects across
the country. These projects are developing bioenergy products of agricultural and forestry
waste, algae, and other non-food biomass resources. Next slide. I’d like to highlight two examples of DOE supported projects that have reached important
milestones this year. In Vero Beach, Florida, INEOS BIO produced cellulosic ethanol that
was used in racing fuels for this year’s Tutor Championships Car Racing events, which
are sanctioned by NASCAR’s I
nternational Motorsports Association. INEOS BIO produced
the fuel from palm fronds and other vegetative wastes. In Emmetsburg, Iowa, Project LIBERTY
just celebrated its grand opening. Project LIBERTY is a cooperative effort between the
US company Poet, and Royal DSM, a company of the Netherlands. Project LIBERTY will produce
cellulosic ethanol and power from corn cobs and other wasted parts of corn plants that
can be removed sustainably from the field. Next slide. As mentioned earlier, the Bioen
ergizeME challenge provides resources and tools to help educators
and students add bioenergy as a current affairs topic for interdisciplinary discussion across
the curriculum. It is designed for 9th through 12th grade students to research bioenergy
prompts and design a bioenergy-related infographic to report their findings. Bioenergy expert
panel selects infographics in a national social media campaign. This national social media
campaign is implemented and executed over a specified time period
to harness various
social media platforms to educate the public on bioenergy. Next slide. This is a two part challenge, I’ll provide a bit of high-level overview of the challenge
structure. In Part 1, the teachers provide BioenergizeME tools and resources to teams
of 2 to 4 students. The student teams select and research a topic question from provided
prompts. Student teams develop an infographic to report their research findings, and then
teachers review the infographic using the provided rubri
c and submit infographics that
meet the challenge requirements to BETO. In Part 2, BETO’s review board evaluates the
entries for objective, referenced messaging and advances those that qualify for this national
social media campaign. Students’ whose infographics qualify for the social media campaign will
receive rules and resources for participation. Next slide. The challenge theme for the beta run is “Bioenergy: Building on the Shoulders of Giants." As I
alluded to, at the onset of this webinar
, bioenergy has been part of our energy portfolio
for thousands of years, and it’s been used in different ways. We are providing research
prompts in our virtual toolkit to help students develop this theme and explore how our use
of bioenergy has changed over time. So Zac’s [static] going to open the virtual toolkit, and we’ll
just scroll through, and I’ll highlight a few things in there.
Okay, this is the beta version of the virtual toolkit. If we could look at the table of
contents. Okay, so th
ese are some of the topics that are covered: an introduction, challenge
details, entry rules, information on judging and review, award details, and then if we
could move to the research topics in just a moment, you’ll notice there is a rubric,
and then the resource library that we spoke of earlier. I’d like to just draw your attention
to the research topics, and show the interdisciplinary and cross-curricular areas that we’ve included.
If we could go to page 5, Zac. Right there, okay so to help
develop this theme, “Bioenergy:
Building on the Shoulders of Giants,” we’ve included a Bioenergy History question that
lets them look at how human use of biomass has changed over time, and how the use of
that has stayed the same, how technology might have impacted that. We also have a workforce
and education questions, couple of those, Zac, if you’ll scroll up a little bit. One
of the things we’d like students to explore is how energy transitions have occurred throughout
history, as we’ve moved
from predominantly one source to another, and so they can explore
some of those changes. And also, what are some the research and employment opportunities
that accompanied those changes, in this case particularly bioenergy development, so that
can help elucidate careers that might be promising for them. The next question, there’s lots to learn
about in science and technology surrounding sustainable transportation fuels, in particular,
bioenergy or biofuels. There are technologies to explore of w
ays to harvest the energy from
plant material, and so we have listed a number of those. There’s also much to understand
about what makes a good bioenergy feedstock, what are some of the feedstocks that are being
explored across the United States. Here’s a place that’s useful to point out, that
for each prompt, we have provided subject headings, in addition to keywords, as we’ve
found that sometimes a short phrase will be more useful in narrowing down sources when they are researching, what come
up. Sometimes even more so than keywords, so we’ve provided
some suggestions there. The last question that we have is related to the environmental
impacts of using biofuels. Using biofuel is neither good nor bad for the environment,
what we’re finding is that how they are done makes all the difference of if they are
beneficial or not. There are great opportunities, there’s also challenges that accompany those.
So we’ve got a few questions that they can explore for environment impacts and that in
cludes
understanding a little bit about the US Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and
how it is trying to help grow this biofuels industry in a way that will have positive
effects on greenhouse gas reduction but also be economically viable. Next slide. Oh sorry, next slide. Again we want to thank you for your interest in this educational initiative, for those
of you participating in the challenge beta, Zac’s going to provide you guidance on how
you can give us feedback and ask question
s. Zac are you able to get on?
Zac: Hi this is Zac, can everyone hear me? Leslie: Yep, I can hear you.
Zac: Great so, first of all I just wanted to show you a quick way to get to the Bioenergy
Technologies Office’s website. So probably the quickest way to do that is to Google search
“Bioenergy Technologies Office” or “beto doe.” From there, it’s the first link.
As this loads. So this is the Bioenergy Technologies Office’s home page. You see there’s a
lot of information on here, and the link to f
ind the Virtual Science Fair page can be
found on this left navigation bar. So if you load up the page and come down here to Education
Workforce Development, click there. This brings up all the resources BETO currently has, and
this is a page that is definitely growing very quickly these days, and down here at
the bottom of the page, you can see the link to the Virtual Science Fair web page, so click
there. And this is the page we have shown in the
slides here, again you see here, you can see th
e Education and Workforce Development found
on the left, and on the very bottom, you can click that link, and that’ll take you to
our page. You can see in this red square at the top that's the link, if you’d rather just type that in
there. But if you do have feedback, questions, comments, anything really that can help us
make this challenge better, as you can see in this bottom box, our emails are right here
so feel free to send us an email at any time. If you could just please include your name
,
your email, the school or organization you’re with and the location, as in city, state,
and zip code, so we don’t need exact location, but those three are pretty crucial, and then finally the nature of your question or comment or concern. So as far as the webinar Q&A- Leslie: Okay, thanks Zac.
Zac: Go ahead Leslie. Leslie: Oh, I was just going to say that we’ll
open up the floor to our webinar participants, and Zac is going to facilitate the question
and answer portion. Zac: Right, so just wan
ted to give you another
reminder here, if you are muted on your phone and you have a question, please unmute yourself
on your own phone. If you do have a question, please click this red button- uh, this button
in the red square here to raise your hand, and we’ll be able to see that on our side,
and we’ll be able to unmute you on our side. And if you have a question you’d rather
ask to the chat box that’s fine as well, so if you could just type it in here, our
organizers will be able to see that
and open up the question to the whole floor.
So we do have a couple of questions here right now. Leslie. Leslie: Okay. Zac: Someone asked, “If the team goes to Part 2 of the challenge, what resources are
provided by BETO to help them?” Leslie: The resources that BETO will provide
is some guidance that we are developing that shows them how to refine the infographic and
prepare the final version to go onto the hosted website here, and then direction on how to
plan out a social media campaign, so b
etween them they’ll have a time period and decide
which social media tools they’re going to use, if they’re going to use Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, any of those, so between the team, then how are they going to reach out to their
social networks. They will be provided a link to their infographic, which will drive viewers
to a centralized place where they’re housed, and that will allow us to track analytics
on the social media and then determine where we’re getting the biggest push with the
soc
ial media campaign. Zac: Great, so we have another question here:
“When are the infographics due?” Leslie: That’s a great question we needed
to add to the webinar, I apologize. October 30th is the target date for that, and then
we are pushing to have a response back to students within a week a so, and from that
point they will receive information on how to move their infographics into step 2. Zac: Okay, “Is there a particular start date?” Leslie: Start date is any time now, as I realize we’re ki
nd of early in the semester, and
it may not fit exactly in with the curriculum that teachers have planned, so we appreciated
you working with us a little bit. When we talked to teachers about this, it was expected
that this was about a two week project, and that was maybe some introduction in class,
and then students could work on it a few hours on their own outside of class as team. As
soon as you feel like you have the materials you need, go ahead and start, and the only
part that really has a
fixed beginning and end is the actual social media campaign, and
we will provide more information about that date at a later time.
Zac: And if I could just add to that, Leslie, we designed this challenge to be something
that educators and teachers could take this and sort put it in their curriculum where
they fit best, so we obviously want you to keep in mind the submission deadline and when
the media campaign period is, but we want to leave everything else open to you, and
how it best fits you
r curriculum and your schedule.
Leslie: Yeah, that’s a great way to word that. Zac: So there’s another question here, “When should we start the research project?” So
I think that kind of aligns with the previous question we had, you know, it’s really up
to you as the educator. Leslie: Agreed Zac: “Can we access all the material on the website?” Leslie: The materials are in draft form right now, so right now they are being provided
to the participating teacher directly by email, just because we a
ssume that there will some
that that we will need to refine a bit as we go through this. Zac, are there particular
materials that you think we can have up on the site? I know we do have some, a number
of videos coming that we, or teacher can use with students and access directly.
Zac: Right, so that is something that we have been looking into putting all the resources
on the website and making them very available to all educators and that is absolutely certain
in the future. I think we are still
discussing this, as far as version control, we’d like
your feedback on the resources we provide, so there is a question about version history,
and sort of having multiple versions of the documents out there, and how it might confuse
teachers if they have an older version, based on however we update it for the national release. So that’s something I think that we were discussing, having the beta resources on the web or not,
but I think that you guys will definitely be the first people to know.
L
eslie: Exactly. Zac: So another question here, “How many
teachers are participating in the beta run?” And Leslie, if I may, we do have 50 teachers
that have signed up for the beta test, and we didn’t really want to close the doors off, so we do have another 15 additional teachers that were interested. They didn’t really
fully commit so around that number. Leslie: Yeah, for the beta run, our target
was to have 50 teachers and then hopefully, we would average 25 teachers with 2-4 student
teams inf
ographics submitted, and that should give us a good cross section to gather information
so that when we do this official launch, we would really be pushing it out by multiple
channels too, and hopefully we have maybe a couple hundred or more teachers. Zac: So we have one more question here, pretty simple question, “Can we have the slides
to be shown to the students?” Leslie: Absolutely, we will have the slides
available for you with the notes at the bottom. We also have two versions of a short d
ocumentary
video about bioenergy; we’re sending links for those. One is just under 5 minutes and
the other is about 15 minutes, and you can use those as you wish in the classroom. Zac: Great, well I don’t see any further questions. We’ll give it one more minute here, if you
do have any more questions, now’s the time, but we will post all these questions and answers
somewhere, so that they’re open to all the educators that didn’t get to attend the
webinar. Give it another minute here, so if anyon
e has any other questions. So I see one question here, When should we anticipate receiving them?” Does that
mean the slides? “Correct,” so the slides. Leslie? Leslie: Our intention was to send out a response or thank you email tomorrow with copies of
the slides in there, so you should receive those tomorrow. The actual recording of the
video may take a little bit more time to have that available, but we intend to have that
available as well, so that it can just be played from beginning to end. Z
ac: So someone’s asking, “Can we provide a little more info about infographics.”
It’s a little vague about it. Leslie: Okay, as part of the package, Zac,
can we go to that page of the Virtual Toolkit? Zac: Mmhm. Leslie: So we have some imagery sources and some examples of infographics that are in
addition to those that are in the slides, and basically, let’s just go ahead and pull
up one of those. And these are by trained graphic artists, so we don’t expect necessarily
the same quality, but the
idea. Like this one, “Warding Off Energy Waste,” it was
a Halloween themed one, but they’ve identified ways throughout a home that you could focus
on reducing energy consumption that are related to things that occur in the fall and winter.
Let’s show another one Zac. Okay this one just displays, is more a graphical
display of data, which is a little more like what we would be, what students could be putting
together. But when they do this research, they do a research project, and then they
come
up with some way they’re responding to the prompt, and display that graphically,
so you’ll notice this is very image rich. “America is one of the fastest growing markets
for wind power in the developing world,” and then just show us in a visual way what
the wind generation capacity is. So this would be something, you could do a similar kind
of study on bioenergy. What do they have at the bottom, let’s scroll down. And then
just some of the other kind of talking points or very number-driven infor
mation that’s
relevant to the question. Zac: Leslie, have we touched on the infographic
development guide that we were working on producing?
Leslie: We just mentioned it; we haven’t shown any part of that. We do have guidelines
about developing that, so that’s a really good point: how familiar will students and
teachers be with infographics. Zac: Alright, so I hope that fully answers
your question. And if you do need more information, like we said, feel free to reach out to us,
send us an email
and we’ll definitely get back to you. Searching for other questions,
I think that might be it though. So here we have, “Is there a size limit
for the infographics?” Leslie: I think we limited those to 8.5x11”
so they fit on a regular printer sized paper. Zac: I think you’re correct on that Leslie.
Leslie: Some of the examples that you’ll see will be longer than that, so really they
are just, we want to keep them very tightly focused on just a few areas, and we don’t
want this to be a whole-semes
ter research requirement, we really want this to be something
they can do in a couple weeks. Zac: And I think, from our side of things,
that you as educators can provide feedback on, and maybe let us know if that was on point,
or asking that we ridiculous, or sort of give us some input on that as we go.
Leslie: Yeah, part of what we’ll send tomorrow with the slides is the guidance and the examples
that we do have together for the infographics, we actually have another partner who is developing
s
omething that is highly outward-faced for that, but we do have those guidelines, we’ll
makes sure that you have them tomorrow. Do we have anything else?
Zac: One question here, “8 feet by 8 inches or 11 feet by 11 inches?” I think that’s
supposed to be 8.5X11 inches. Yeah inches. Leslie: And actually, it can go either way, it can be either portrait or landscape. Hey Zac, why don’t we do a last call? Zac: Alright, sounds good, we’ll give it
another couple seconds here then we’ll close up. Alright
, we’ll close the questions for now; remember you can always reach us by going
to the website and looking at our emails and sending us a message.
Leslie: We’ll be reaching out regularly to you as well. Really look forward to your
input in refining the beta version, and also just to get this in front of student and get
them thinking about this in a fun way. We’re looking forward to this beta activity, if
you have other instructors that you think might be interested in participating, please
encour
age them to contact us, or share the information we’re providing you to them
and then we’ll be ready for a nice big national launch in the future. Thank you all for being
here.
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