These are my notes from Mark Clemente’s presentation, “NASA Resources for Millennial Learners” at the One to One Institute‘s conference on November 9, 2009 conference in Chicago, Illinois. MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. I am recording this session and hope to share it as a podcast later.
NASA eClips is NASA’s newest program, one we’ll discuss today but we’ll address others too
Mark is with the National Institute of Aerospace
– innovative real world learning for the 21st century
– we are a research institute for NASA
– our mission: develop aerospace engineers
– consortium of 7 universities
Mark is going to publish is presentation to Slideshare
We have K-12 outreach
– developing resources for STEM specifically
– one of NASA’s missions by law is education
I am personally on loan from the Virginia Beach public schools to NASA
All of these links are available via my Filamentality hotlist:
tinyurl.com/yz24fmq
Traditional NASA education products
– have 30-60 minute video clips
– philosophy was: teachers should be able to make sense of these resources
eClips are short: 5-7 minutes (7 minutes is max time)
– these are content focused, and NASA focused
– we have taken NASA missions and technology, and found the things that really tie in well to a math/science classroom
– idea is you can use these videos to engage students, answer the question: “Why do I need to know this?”
There are three people on our NASA eClips team, I am the high school person (also have an elementary and middle school educators)
4 programs under NASA eClips:
- NASA’s Our World (K-5: compare the natural world with the designed world, illustrating the unique contributions of scientists and engineers)
- NASA’s REAL World Mathematics
- NASA Launchpad
- NASA 360 degrees
big push in STEM for engineering
MARK’S DELL WINDOWS XP LAPTOP LOCKED UP WHEN HE TRIED TO PLAY THE FIRST VIDEO CLIP, SO HE IS RESTARTING. TIME TO GET A MAC, MARK! 🙂
In Middle school, we often start to lose students in math
– so we have a real push to engage students there
launchpad is a focus on technology
we are trying to model how we can effectively use video clips in the classroom
– it is more than just
Example: Real World: Farewell to the Mars Phoenix Lander
K-5 example: Our World: The Sun, A Real Star
Learn about the important relationship between Earth and the sun. Find out about the layers of the sun and how Earth’s magnetosphere acts like a giant handkerchief to protect us from all kinds of space weather.
Middle school example: Real World: Monitoring Earth’s Energy Budget with CERES
In this NASA eClips video segment learn how NASA uses CERES, a satellite in our Earth observing system, to make accurate measurements of energy leaving the Earth. Discover how NASA studies the interactions of clouds with sunlight and heat to determine how much heat is emitted back into space. Demonstrations are used to help support the segment.
High school example: Launchpad: Transits
Discover how scientists used the last Venus transit and a geometric technique called parallax to verify the distance between sun and Earth. Find out what scientists hope to learn the next time Venus makes a shadow on the face of the sun.
2 ways to access these videos:
1 – go to NASA.gov website, click for educators and on sidebar click NASA eClips
– direct link: www.nasa.gov/education/nasaeclips
2- can also access via YouTube: www.youtube.com/nasaeclips
Icons are available for topics, these are changing from “aeronautics” and “earth” to things like “algebra” and “chemistry”
– videos can be downloaded and played from the NASA website, are player independent, are all closed captioned!
YouTube channel videos have higher quality than NASA website versions, they can also be embedded (AS I HAVE ABOVE)
MY COMMENT: KUDOS TO NASA FOR MODELING THE CONSTRUCTIVE USE OF YOUTUBE IN THE CLASSROOM!
Have also started building support for these videos: The Teacher Toolbox
NASA.gov has an internal bookmarking system called “MyNASA”
– good way to deal with the dynamic nature of the NASA website, where things are changing frequently
– NASA is very conscious about having the most current information available online
– lots of the older resources that referred to Pluto as “a planet” are not available now, because those resources have been taken down until they are updated
Also: Engineering Design Guides are available for K-5 and 6-12 to help teachers introduce students to the engineering design process
Keeping a logbook to document your process is a key element for scientists
also has a rubric to help you assess what students can build
Use Google for an advanced search to find relevant NASA resources: example search syntax: “NASA” and “social studies”
There are TONS of NASA missions in addition to space shuttle and Apollo program!
NASA eClips™ Educator Guides: We are in the process of getting 24 lesson plans approved for using videos effectively in a lesson plan, how to tie content directly to the video
– 8 per grade level (8 for elementary, 8 for middle school, 8 for high school)
– right now there are just 3 eClips Educator Guides available now, more are being drafted now
Last thing we are doing: the Teacher to Teacher Blog
– just got approval for this last month
– is highly moderated
– trying to get teachers in the classroom to share their experiences, ideas, etc.
– not a lot of activity there yet, we are trying to get people to go there and share their thoughts
MY QUESTION: HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
Answer: lots of web statistics gathered on hits
– is getting more attention/hits than
MY QUESTION: ARE YOU PROVIDING WORKSHOPS FOR SCHOOLS
– answer: they can, and they do when those are requested
Nortel Learn It, now “Teach It Learn It” is a program for using digital images and video in the classroom
– sample rubrics are available for assessing student projects
Other NASA resources
– click on FOR EDUCATORS in top bar
– you can click FIND TEACHING MATERIALS and choose from a variety of checkboxes now
content on nasa.gov is not embeddable currently
March 2008 contract was issued for eClips, so NASA’s use of YouTube in this project preceeded the Obama Administration’s use of YouTube and other social media websites
Most content now seems to be geared toward elementary and middle school students
The NASA “Ask an Astrophysicist” program is the only interactive part of the NASA website currently
– he does SpaceMap at NASA (worksheet activities, warmups for teachers)
Projects to get kids involved
– Star Count: you as a citizen get information about how to collect data, and you report your data in
– satellite information is validated using that information
-S’COOL: ground truth verification
– you are told when a satellite is going to be overhead, and you are asked to take land-based photographs showing what the clouds look like from the ground
http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/SCOOL
– Dr Lynn Chambers runs this project and actually uses that data
NASA World Wind
– NASA’s answer to Google Earth
– get world maps, and can overlay NASA data
– if NASA collects the data, you can overlay it onto the earth
http://worldwide.arc.nasa.gov/java
– you can download the software development kit (SDK) and develop your own
– someone just told me about this a month ago, it’s been available a LONG time though!
DiscoveryNOW is a 90 second video blurb podcast on NPR telling about something going on at NASA now
– can use this along with “Do It Yourself Podcasting” which NASA offers
– NASA Podcasts
– NASA Podcasting Help page
Sun-Earth Viewer shows different live images of the sun with different filters
– visualizations of the data
– realtime data
Landsat is part of NASA’s mission
– can do overlays, lots of imagery
– you own all of this stuff, because NASA is public
Internet Archive
– www.nasaimages.org setup by the Internet Archive
– thousands of available images
NASA Goddard Space Center has the largest collection of earth scientists in the world!
– lots of earth science done by NASA
Global Climate Change is out of NASA Langley
NASA centers are setup autonomously, so coordination between different websites is challenging
Because of STEM, our program is a great example of how NASA is now really paying attention to teacher voices and ideas
– it is a HUGE step forward
Career Bytes is a “Teach It Learn It” resource focused on careers and helping students connect with others for job/career learning
Do you have an idea of a career path you would like to follow or would like to learn about? The Career Bytes online interviews are short (~5 minute) videos exploring technology or technology-related career paths. Find (below) interviews that showcase diverse backgrounds, talents, and interest areas — from game creators to test pilots to rock stars! Career Bytes profile professionals discussing how they became successful, their challenges and interests, and how technology impacts their daily work.
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