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The GeoMapApp Learning Activities website has not been significantly updated since 2012. We are preserving the web pages here because they still contain useful ideas and content. But be aware that the site may have out of date information.
The Teaching Activities Collection at Teach the Earth draws from newer projects across SERC.
Initial Publication Date: October 7, 2011

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.