This project is adopting and adapting a recently-developed National Earth Science Teachers Association (NESTA) website template to transition two state-level (California and Michigan) ESTA websites into redesigned and expanded web entities that reflect the respective state education standards. The project is also evaluating and refining the process, training, and support needed to accomplish the transition in order to establish how to best offer, at reasonable cost and with maximum efficiency, such services to other state-level ESTAs in the future. The project is providing training and support to volunteer ESTA leaders in two target states, and is significantly enhancing the ability of these organizations to provide resources to their members. Because the state ESTA websites are linked to the national NESTA website, the project also is helping to enhance the widespread sharing of educational materials and other information among the community of earth science educators in the US.
Professional associations play an important role in helping members stay up to date with advances in their field, develop and maintain a feeling of professionalism and comradary, and keep abreast of new opportunities for training to provide optimal services to those they serve. Historically, Earth and space science K-12 educators across the country have struggled to develop Earth Science Teacher Associations (ESTAs) at the state level for several reasons, including a lack of time and resources as classroom teachers. Nonetheless, it is critically important for K-12 teachers to have representation from organizations that are dedicated to their specific mission, which differs from that of scientific organizations, or organizations targeting university or other professionals. In the past decade, as the use of the internet has become ubiquitous and the need for organizational websites has become essential, ESTA leaders have struggled to be able to provide websites for their members, not only because they have little time to keep website content up to date, but even more importantly, because they lack experience with website development and hosting. Numerous ESTAs across the country have struggled with this problem, without an obvious solution. The purpose of this project was to build on the website structure developed through a previous NSF grant, which funded development of NESTA's website, and extend that effort to allow ESTAs to adopt our website structure. Through this project, we have been able to provide centralized support for another ESTA (the Michigan Earth Science Teachers Association - MESTA), which has successfully adopted our website structure. The project provided training for MESTA leadership and continuning online and telephone support, as needed. The project demonstrated that this approach can be successful - MESTA's website is up and running, and the process for website development (completing existing online page templates and drawing on existing resource bases rather than having to create them separately to support the website) went smoothly, once needed decisions of the MESTA Board were completed. In addition to providing support for MESTA's website transition, we also have provided training and support for MESTA to adopt the template of NESTA's online monthly newsletter - NESTA ENews, so that now MESTA can offer a monthly online newsletter to its members using the existing infrastructure NESTA developed in the past. The end results of this project include: (1) the ability to leverage existing online resources in support of multiple organizations, rather than the need to develop resources from scratch for each, which saved both time and money; (2) the provisioning of training to ESTA leaders in website development and html, which provides a skill they can use in other applications in the future; (3) a demonstration that with seed money for a project like this, it is possible to leverage the power of volunteer-run professional societies to accomplish needed tasks in support of their membership, leading to a savings of time and money, rather than requiring support for all of the time involved in creating the online capabilities and resources developed through a project. Given the opportunity, volunteers can and do accomplish tasks at a lower overall cost, based on their commitment to an organization. Some initial support is needed, though, to enable that volunteer spirit to be applied. Based on the success of this effort, several additional ESTAs have approached NESTA expressing interest in the possibility of adopting our website template (in Hawaii, Texas, and Indiana). We are now working on developing a cost structure for this service that will be within the means of a small ESTA and still make a meaningful contribution toward the costs of providing the service.
