Thanks Bill, GLOBE is really doing well. It meets a lot of the goals of NGSS and it gets students thinking about how to design a project, collect data and analyze that data. There are several opportunities for students to present their research as well (virtually and in person). One of the first types of observations that students can take that is very interesting and easy to do is cloud observations. We also like the surface temperature protocol (partly because I developed it) but also students seem to really like it and can do research projects on impacts of land cover on temperature pretty easily. Kevin

We have worked the K-2 teachers and students. I'm always amazed at what the students can do. Seasons is one of the topics the students have to study often. GLOBE fits with green down in the fall, snow in the winter and green up in the spring. There is also an aerosol protocol for younger students that has been used by several K-2 students for projects. They use sticky paper to collect the particles and relate them to things like kids playing on the playground or pollution from the street.

I second Kevin's comments.  As a part of a year long PD project at the University of northern Iowa, our team worked with K-12th grade teachers.  One Kindergarten teacher was especially successful with using Elementary GLOBE and GLOBE materials with her students using the theme of seasons.  She began with the Elementary GLOBE Activity, the Color of Seasons, and a discussion of how to identify natural and man made items in their school grounds.  Rather than using crayons on paper, the students used digital cameras to take photographs of the color of our school grounds once a month.  Throughout the year, the class prepared a color of the seasons photo presentation.  They loved to look back on the past photos and that inspired them to look in the same places to see if the colors changed - without trying they established (and invented for themselves) photo points! This class also did some green up and down and some cloud identification. 

Grant, GLOBE takes a scaffolded approach to the teaching of Earth System Science and has something for everyone from K-12 and beyond. Check out the Elementary GLOBE webpage with a full list of resources, activities and storybooks for the Elementary school students you are working with at https://www.globe.gov/web/elementary-globe
-----Also check out our GLOBE Student Experience video here in the Showcase at  http://stemforall2018.videohall.com/presentatio...

Hi Donna,

It is good to hear from you. We don't have any trainings from my group in any of those locations. We are focused on Ohio/Michigan, Oakland, CA, New Mexico, Providence, RI, Tennessee and SW New Jersey. 

Donna - There are active GLOBE Partners in Georgia and LA.  You or your partners might reach out to them to see what might be possible.  In Oklahoma I think there is some interest, but perhaps not so much activity right now.  Your group might be able to catalyze something.

Hi Claire, I'll let Kevin and his team answer for this project specifically.  I was the Iowa GLOBE Coordinator for 15 years and our students and teachers had frequent contact with scientists at many different levels.  

The most common contact is via the GLOBE website.  Every GLOBE protocol was developed by a Scientist or team with feedback from educators.  A part of the protocols is an explanation of what that first team does with the data, what questions she is interested in answering with the data, and why the science is important.  Through the GLOBE Program Science Blog, facebook page, webinars and online community boards, the entire GLOBE community is kept up to date on what scientists are learning and how data collection champagnes are contributing to satellite and other missions.  These same tools and the student science fairs, research symposium, and learning expeditions allow students to share what they are learning with the scientists!

But I've also found that when students at an individual school are collecting data and they run into trouble, have a question, or make an unusual discovery, the GLOBE Scientists and help desk respond to emails and community boards.  When lots of students and schools have the same questions, then the topic will show up in the blog or a webinar because for every group of students who reaches out, there are probably others who don't realize that they can/should. 

For example, about 10 years ago I was working with 3 middle schools who were working together to collect MUC data for the land cover team.  They had a goal to collect at least 10 MUC site data sets for every landcover type in the county.  After 2 weeks of intensive daily evening collections, some of the students at just one school discovered that about 1/4 of their data points were mapped to the wrong places.  The students knew that they were NOT accidentally collecting data in the middle of a town 7.5 miles to the SE.  Members of the landcover team looked at the mapped data, they asked the students which points were "wrong" and where the data belonged.  The puzzle was confounded because some students HAD collected data in that town!  But pulling out the "wrong sites" and looking where the students said they had collected the data quickly revealed a pattern - all of sites were offset by the same distance and direction.  Two of that school's 8 GPS units were set to degrees and minutes rather than degrees and decimal degrees.  The data has all been entered as degrees and decimal degrees - offsetting just 1/4 of that school's data by exactly the same distance and direction for each point.  The students were able to use a little math to re-enter their location data and fix all of the data points.  I think this is an awesome example of how GLOBE teaches the collaborative nature of science - the students got to work together with the science team and help desk to figure out what was going on - it wasn't a case of the scientist swooping in and declaring "Your GSP units are not set up correctly!"  The students knew where they had collected the data and that something was wrong, the science team would never have known the data points were in the wrong places without the student observations and the students needed the science teams deeper knowledge of how GPS works.  It was a team effort to solve the mystery!

Thanks Marcy, It is always good to hear from you. I can add that in GLOBE Mission EARTH we set up a Google Doc to help us keep track of all of the scientists and what they are doing with students. It turns out that scientists in our group do stuff with schools but don't let anyone know about it. I'm guilty of that too. Most of the interactions look to be one time visits to a school or answers to emails from students about their projects. But, there are cases with more in depth interaction with the scientist. Margaret Pippin at NASA Langley is working with GLOBE teachers and students on aerosols. She frequently works with the teachers and students, has web meetings, etc. The richness of her interaction with the teachers and students is evident in the quality of the research projects the students produce.

Congratulations to Robby!  I do remember his video taping and the visit we had with you and the boys and Carol Boyce at the Waterloo Arboretum a few years back.  You gave us a look at one of your new temperature cameras. 

GLOBE is still near and dear to my heart and I'm still occasionally presenting a conference session on citizen science in the classroom which (obviously) features GLOBE and stories from Iowa schools. 

I'm also taking the collaboration, networking, and grant writing skills that I developed working with GLOBE to work with faculty all across our campus on STEM related projects, like the project that got me looking into this year's Showcase videos - Teaching Mathematics to Struggling Learners (video at: http://videohall.com/p/1211) by the University of Northern Iowa Center for teaching and Learning Mathematics.  If the conference had been 2 weeks late this year, I would have participated as my vacation.  We are piloting a new 8 week high school summer research apprentice program and I couldn't be gone while the apprentices are on campus.

Presenting like professionals was a big goal of GLOBE. It separates what we do from traditional science fairs. The GLOBE Program offers regional symposia. At the University of Toledo, we have a symposium, we call the SATELLITES Conference in which students present and then go on to present at the midwest regional GLOBE symposium. 

Thanks for your comment Danielle. The project is kind of big and kind of small. We have parallel activities going on at 7 locations: University of Toledo, Boston University, Tennessee State University, Palmyra Cove Discovery Center in NJ, UC Berkeley/WestEd, Dept. Education New Mexico and NASA Langley. Each partner works with teachers and students in their area. The University of Toledo (UT) manages all the partners in the entire group and we work with teachers and students in Ohio and Michigan. I am the PI of the entire project and there is an education and an engineering professors that help out in their specializations. We have a project manager at UT who we call the miracle worker. She does amazing things organizing the entire group plus the parts at UT. We have a part time person at UT that does the evaluation with our Ohio/Michigan teachers and students and we have 2 graduate students, one in education and one in Geography. For what each partner does, we are quite lean. The video was made by the education grad student. 

Thanks Rebeeca,

We just had the GLOBE midwest regional student symposium in Detroit this past weekend. It was great to see the students research projects. Hopefully, we are changing students' lives.