Project Outline

Title: GeoMapApp Learning Activities and the K-12 Classroom: Transformative Resources for the 21st Century Educator

Funding: National Science Foundation grant number GeoEd 1035036.

Proposal: Read the full GeoMapApp Learning Activities proposal (Acrobat (PDF) 526kB Mar10 11).

Project lead: Andrew Goodwillie - Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (more info) , Columbia University.
Project lead: Steve Kluge - Resources for Geoscience Education, and Bedford NY Central Schools (retired).
Project host: Science Education Resource Center (SERC), Carleton College.
Project evaluator: Susan Lynds - CIRES , University of Colorado, Boulder.

Description

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 to bolsterr the 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.