This award is being used to create a suite of K-12, student-centered learning activities, called mini-lessons, that utilize resources available through GeoMapApp, an on-line, free data discovery and exploration tool that incorporates hundreds of built-in scientific data sets. These ready-to-use cyber-education learning modules cover a number of geoscience concepts and inquiry-based learning requirements contained in the New York state K-12 Earth science core curriculum. Hosted at SERC-Carleton and available to all, each mini-lesson includes goals and learning outcomes, guiding questions, downloadable handouts, links to standards, pre- and post- quizzes to assess the student-driven learning experience, and links for teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of mini-lessons and impact on learning. Under the auspices of teacher professional development, hands-on workshops are being used to entrain a cohort of practising teachers as early-adopter collaborators to use the GeoMapApp mini-lessons in their classrooms within and around New York City. Feedback and experiences of teachers will be used to improve the mini-lessons. The target audience for GeoMapApp mini-lessons is middle and high school Earth science teachers and their students, with additional applicability at the community college level. GeoMapApp is a cutting edge, transformative tool that lies at the intersection of open data access, exploration, discovery and visualization and is being increasingly tapped by a wide range of users in the broader Earth sciences community. It facilitates the incorporation of spatially-arranged data and map-based learning within educational practice. geoscience educational experience. The mini-lessons being developed through GeoEd funding provide context for the GeoMapApp platform that is helping to advance public Earth system science literacy.
Many of the issues facing society require policy-makers and voters to make informed decisons based upon scientific data. Additionally, students entering today's workforce are better served when they are technologically savvy and possess the necessary skill sets required to analyse data and synthesise information. In this NSF Geo Ed award, we developed a suite of education modules for middle and high school students that covers a range of earth science curriculum content. The modules, called GeoMapApp Learning Activities, provide teachers with ready-to-use lesson plans for teaching some foundational concepts of geoscience. The activities can be downloded for free from this web site: http://serc.carleton.edu/geomapapp/collection.html Each activity requires students to examine the same authentic data using the same free map-based tool (GeoMapApp, www.geomapapp.org/) as used by researchers. The modules adopt a guided inquiry approach and include clear instructions, thus helping students learn through self-paced discovery. Topics include plate tectonics, topography, landscapes, seasons and climate change. Each activity comes with student handouts and worksheets and teaching tips. In this award, a data provider and a teaching expert collaborated to develop eleven learning activities. Each activity was vetted during day-long hands-on teacher professional development workshops in which teachers came to Lamont for the day and critiqued the modules. That feedback helped to improve the activities before they were posted on-line. In addition, hands-on workshops were run at a number of regional and national teacher meetings including the NSTA STEM Forum and Expo, the NSTA annual meeting, and regional meetings of the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut Earth Science Teacher associations. We also were chosen to run a workshop at the Fall 2012 AGU Geophysical Information For Teachers (GIFT) event. Teachers report that GeoMapApp Learning Activities boost the understandding of their students, promote student analytical skills, help bring real-world scientific data into the classroom and expose students to free, cutting-edge web-based technology. Thus, the activities are helping to train the next generation of decision-makers and voters in the analysis and interpretation of geoscience data. The project web pages have been visited thousands of times by educators and people from across the nation and by international visitors from more than 70 countries. GeoMapApp Learning Activities are available here: http://serc.carleton.edu/geomapapp/collection.html
