What's New @ SERC 2019
Reviewed Collections
CLEAN climate literacy and energy collection
The CLEAN site includes more than 700 ready-to-use resources that have been reviewed by educators and scientists for secondary and higher education settings. New materials include strategies for Managing Controversy in the Classroom, new themed STEM Flash e-Newsletters, and a series of webinars, which have been recorded for viewing at your convenience. In addition, guidance is given for creating your own NGSS-aligned units, utilizing CLEAN resources. The resources are complimented by the CLEAN Network: a professionally diverse community of climate literacy stakeholders who engage through weekly teleconferences and an active email list.
Cutting Edge exemplary collection
The best of the activities at On the Cutting Edge as scored on scientific veracity; alignment of goals, activity, and assessment; pedagogical effectiveness; robustness; and completeness of the ActivitySheet. Check back regularly: The collection will grow as the peer review process continues.
Teaching Computation Using MATLAB exemplary activity collection
This year, Teaching Computation in the Sciences Using MATLAB community members peer reviewed the collection of more than 100 MATLAB based teaching activities. The strongest of these teaching activities are highlighted in an exemplary collection showcasing high quality teaching with MATLAB. Explore the exemplary collection and consider submitting your own MATLAB teaching activity for the next round of peer review.
Department and Program Guidance
ADVANCEGeo Partnership: Empowering geoscientists to transform workplace climate
The ADVANCEGeo Partnership has developed a suite of online resources about relevant research and tested strategies to respond to sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination in the geosciences. New topical resources include Creating Inclusive Climates, Recognizing Bias, and A Primer on Diversity.
EvaluateUR
EvaluateUR provides an online guided evaluation process designed to be used by programs that support summer research experiences for undergraduates. This year, the website was updated to accommodate the rapidly growing number of participating programs from around the country. The website includes new supporting resources such as a guides, community forum, and FAQ's.
SAGE 2YC Project Descriptions
The Change Agent teams that are part of the Supporting and Advancing Geoscience Education in Two-Year Colleges (SAGE 2YC) program have published project descriptions highlighting the work they have done to create positive change in their departments, institutions, and regional networks. These descriptions can serve as models for others wishing to initiate change efforts in the two-year college context and beyond.
NAGT's Traveling Workshops Program
The Traveling Workshops Program (TWP) brings national leaders in environmental, sustainability, and geoscience education to your campus, regional, or national event. The TWP focuses on opportunities to strengthen both courses and programs including attracting and supporting diverse students. Since 2014, the TWP has visited over 50 institutions and reached more than 750 faculty members in the earth and environmental sciences. Workshop topics include Supporting the Success of All Students, Strengthening your Cross-campus Environmental and Sustainability Programs, Strengthening Earth Science in Teacher Education, and Making Your Course More Effective and Societally Relevant.
Teaching Resources
Project EDDIE: Earth and Ecosystems
This year marks the launch of the Project EDDIE: Earth and Ecosystems initiative and its accompanying website. Project EDDIE is focused on developing an expanding community of instructors able to effectively use and develop teaching materials that use large datasets to teach scientific concepts and quantitative reasoning. Recordings are available of webinars focused on the adoption and development of existing EDDIE modules that span environmental disciplines such as ecology, limnology, hydrology, and seismology. A group synthesis and participant contributed materials are also now available from the Teaching Quantitative Reasoning with Data Workshop and information is available about the October EDDIE Module Development Workshop.
GEODE: Google Earth for Onsite Distance Education
The Google Earth for Onsite Distance Education (GEODE) project has launched its new website dedicated to visualization resources for teaching and learning. Specific foci of this project included enhancements to virtual globes such as Google Earth that allow for plate tectonic reconstructions, embedded virtual specimens and outcrops, interactive imagery, "grand tours" of the Earth (and other planets and moons), and learning modules using large geoscience datasets. GEODE designed teaching activities and tutorials can be found on the website.
Teaching Nanoscience across the STEM Curriculum
This module provides the "What," "Why," and "How" to incorporate nanoscience in geoscience course work (e.g. Mineralogy, Geochemistry, Petrology, Hydrology, Environmental Geology). The resources are a companion to a 10-page review article in Science magazine: "Natural, incidental, and engineered nanomaterials and their impacts on the Earth system," authored by Michael Hochella et al. An online annotated bibliography of over 500 references that can be readily integrated into coursework on topics across the geoscience curriculum, and Powerpoint presentations from the Goldschmidt 2017 and Goldschmidt 2018 Nanoscience workshops are also part of the site.
On-Ramps for Teaching in Tectonics
On-Ramps are quick-start guides to help you get up to speed in widely used strategies for actively engaging students in the classroom to improve learning. Developed for the tectonics community but with wide applicability to all areas of the geosciences, these guides cover strategies ranging from teaching with interactive lectures to strategies for quantitative skill-building. Each On-Ramp describes a specific strategy and includes advantages, tips for success, catalyst examples, and links to web resources.
Design Successful Student Field Experiences
The new Design Successful Student Field Experiences pages in Teach the Earth showcase resources from NAGT sponsored programs, as well as other projects and partners in the discipline, that provide strategies and insights for building strong field experiences. The resources are grouped into topical pages on enhancing student learning and engagement, supporting all students in the field, and designing for safety and minimizing risk.
GETSI: GEodesy Tools for Societal Issues
GETSI is releasing new teaching materials modules for engaging geoscience undergraduate students in addressing societally important Earth science questions through the use of geodetic data. Check out the teaching modules, for introductory-level, majors-level, classroom, and field courses.
InTeGrate professional development webinar series 2012-2019
Recordings from the 2018-2019 InTeGrate Webinar Series are now available in addition to the archive of webinars extending from 2012-2017. This year, the foci of the webinar series were interdisciplinary environmental departments and programs, supporting all students, and teaching with InTeGrate materials. Webinars covered topics such as departmental climate and geoethics, sustainability education, multicontext theory, adapting and linking InTeGrate modules, and preparing students for environmental careers.
More SERC-hosted resources
Search Teach the Earth
The Teach the Earth portal is an entry point for educators in the geosciences and related fields to find a broad array of teaching and learning resources. Consolidating thousands of resources from dozens of independent projects, this NAGT-managed hub provides Earth educators a "one-stop shop" where they can search multiple Earth Education websites for a specific course or activity or browse resources by topic, level, pedagogic strategy, and much more.
Portal for Higher Ed
SERC's For Higher Ed portal provides faculty, program leads, department chairs, and learning centers with direct access to resources that help improve teaching and learning, design courses and programs, create inter-institutional networks, support career paths, and more. Recently updated resources in the portal include Broaden Participation in STEM and Making and Sustaining Institutional Change.