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Welcome to Digging Into Data  

Hi Everyone,
Welcome! We hope that you have had a smooth start to this school year. Since we last met, we have continued to grow our Web site. You will find many new resources in the Investigation Resources section. If you have yet to locate the data you need for your first activity, you may want to browse through the new resources that have been added. Also, please do not hesitate to send "SOS" messages. That is, on Monday and Tuesday, it is perfectly fine to make posts such as, "Help! I'm looking for data that shows total dissolved solids in well water in Massachusetts! Does anyone know where I can I find this?" Your colleagues and the DataTools staff will do all they can to assist you in the process of finding and formatting the data you need.
Nick and Carla will be facilitating the group discussion areas each day. However, all of the DataTools project staff will also be in and out of all four of the discussion areas to answer questions as needed.
We look forward to "seeing" you online.
Thanks,---Carla & Nick

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Hi everyone,

I am excited to be here after a very short summer. Learner.org has plenty of geographical data about the migration of many animals(Monarch butterflies and Cranes etc.). I thought I will use this data to show the children that even though many species migrate south, they take different routes. Even their flight altitudes differ. This is a neat way to bring to a life science class, discussions on many issues that involve migration, changes, patterns, survival etc.

Anyone who wants to test out this idea needs to work on arcvoyager. Any takers?

Jayanthi

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The following website is a rich data resource for migratory creatures: songbirds, Monarch butterflies, Caribous and many other species.

learner.org/jnorth/www/sightings/archives.html

I chose Monarch butterflies and Red winged blackbird data. The first sightings are reported by various people and this is recorded in the archives. These are the steps I took to gather the data.

- Go to spring 2006 ‘raw’ data.
- Choose Monarch Adult first sighted from the drop down menu.
- Fill in ‘March 2006 for date.
- Lastly click on the ‘Press here’ key.
- Copy the data by right clicking the select all option
- Paste the data in Excel to make it ready for arcvoyager.
- Except for longitudes/latitudes all other data can be deleted.
- Name this file appropriately to make it arcvoyager ready.


Now, in the same fashion collect ‘Red Winged blackbird first sighted raw data. You will find 245 entries. Name this file ‘red winged blackbird.txt’ file.

- Open arcvoyager and get the North America map.
- Overlay the Monarch and Red winged blackbird data on the map.
- Please be sure to choose different marking keys for the two.

Discussion: I purposely chose an Invertebrate (butterfly) and a Vertebrate species to generate a lot of comparison between the different flight patterns, the speeds, the flight duration, the stopovers, the reasons for stopovers, directions and the clues for directions. There are a number of interesting detours one could take in this site. There are suggestions and support materials. However, the options are limitless and one could tailor make their own life science/ weather unit from this.

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