HR: 1340h
AN: ED23A-0961    [Abstracts]
TI: Climate Discovery: NCAR Online Education Climate and Global Change Professional Development Program
AU: * Ward, D L
EM: dward@ucar.edu
AF: UCAR Education and Outreach, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80301, United States
AU: Johnson, R M
EM: rmjohnsn@ucar.edu
AF: UCAR Education and Outreach, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80301, United States
AU: Foster, S
EM: susanf@ucar.du
AF: UCAR Education and Outreach, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80301, United States
AU: Henderson, S
EM: sandrah@ucar.edu
AF: UCAR Education and Outreach, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80301, United States
AU: Gardiner, L
EM: egardine@ucar.edu
AF: UCAR Education and Outreach, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80301, United States
AU: Russell, R
EM: rrussell@ucar.edu
AF: UCAR Education and Outreach, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80301, United States
AU: Meymaris, K
EM: kirstenm@ucar.edu
AF: UCAR Education and Outreach, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80301, United States
AU: Hatheway, B
EM: hatheway@ucar.edu
AF: UCAR Education and Outreach, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80301, United States
AB: The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is offering middle and high school teachers an opportunity to learn about the science of climate and how current research is advancing our understanding through Climate Discovery, a series of three online professional development courses. The goals of the Climate Discovery online course series are to provide climate science content relevant to National Science Education Standards, to share easy to implement, hands-on classroom activities that facilitate student understanding of climate and global change, and to provide a broad overview of Earth system science to educator-leaders who are teaching sciences at the middle and high school levels. The first course in the series, Introduction to Earth's Climate, explores climate science and serves as the introduction to the Climate Discovery series. The second course, Earth System Science: A Climate Change Perspective, explores Earth as a system from the perspective of climate and global change, describing the interactions between the various parts of the Earth system, and how they all affect our climate. The final course, Understanding Climate Change Today, provides an opportunity to learn about the impacts of global change as well as exploring how climate models are developed and used to understand likely scenarios of future climate and how current scientific research is improving the quality of climate predictions. The online courses, instructed by science education specialists, combine information about current research and modeling efforts with classroom-tested science inquiry activities. The online course experience features a high level of interactivity, tools for assessment, and effective community-building interactive technologies. We encourage teachers immediately apply their learning by enriching their existing standards-aligned science curriculum, bringing the science of Earth's climate to their students. In this presentation, course developers and instructors will share some of the benefits and challenges encountered during this project, as well as updating the status of current efforts and plans for the coming year. We will also share our efforts to extend this professional development model to a new online course developed to support the Bilingual Science Teachers Annual Resources Symposium (BSTARS), engaging bilingual science educators from across Colorado in a hybrid in-person/online professional development experience.
DE: 0830 Teacher training
DE: 1622 Earth system modeling (1225)
DE: 1630 Impacts of global change (1225)
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting