HR: 0800h
AN: ED11D-1116    [Abstracts]
TI: eGY Education and Outreach: Creating a Virtual Educational Space that Pushes the Envelope for Connecting Teachers and Students to Data
AU: * CoBabe-Ammann, E
EM: ecobabe@lasp.colorado.edu
AF: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado 1234 Innovation Drive, Boulder, CO 80303 United States
AU: Hardin, J
EM: hardin@umich.edu
AF: University of Michigan, Media Union Bonisteel Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 United States
AU: Fox, P
EM: pfox@ucar.edu
AF: National center for Atmospheric Research, Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305 United States
AB: The eGY Education and Outreach Program is developing an education portal that connects teachers around the world, in a well-defined way, to the virtual observatories and their data. Using Sakai as the course management platform and drawing on the OCW model, as well as content development models adapted from TERC's Earth Exploration Toolkit, the programming at the eGY portal would allow teachers to use the virtual observatories and its data in an educational context, with supporting materials and activities. Topics included in the eGY portal range from climate change to ocean sciences to the Sun-Earth connection to global seismology, with an emphasis on the intellectual themes that are the focus of other I*Y efforts. In addition, and perhaps as important, the portal will support virtual educational communities, both synchronously and asynchronously. The site will also support virtual seminars (on both science content and educational practices), multimedia assets for teachers, scientific talks, computer-based animations and interactives. Lastly, the eGY program also works with a variety of virtual observatories and other distributed data systems to develop a deeper understanding of the needs of the non-specialist users. The hallmark of the eGY educational program is the implementation of virtual teachers workshops for training high-school and junior college teachers around the world in the use of the portal and its assets. During 2007, as a lead into the eGY, a series of teacher workshops would be run in a virtual environment to an estimated 3000* teachers in over 20 countries. we anticipate that 50 pairs of master teachers in North America will be connected, point-to-point, to 150 to 200 international classrooms of teachers for the workshop. *Currently, in countries that have expressed interest in the program, requests for allotted teacher spots exceed expectation by an order of magnitude and this number is likely to increase.
DE: 0800 EDUCATION
DE: 0825 Teaching methods
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005