Synopsis
How can we sustain and improve our innovations to promote lifelong science learning? What have we learned about designing computer-based materials that transform science education? What are open questions and promising directions? How can we collaborate to stimulate change? What strategies and revenue streams will lead to sustainability of promising innovations?

Many exciting NSF-funded materials languish on the electronic shelves or get replaced by the latest technology fad (Smartboards, video lectures, eTextbooks).  This session showcases pedagogically sound, open-source materials that can form a foundation for future innovations. The presenters invite discussion about approaches to ensure that the DR K-12 program creates a progressing and sustainable portfolio of innovations. The presenters invite participants to contrast DR K-12 innovations with commercial successes [like Smartboards] and popular trends [like “flipped” classrooms and and eTextbooks] and to identify strategies we can use to increase our market share!!

Introduction: What have the presenters learned in their 30 years of collaboration?

Discussion: What innovations and sustainability strategies hold promise? What is the role of pedagogy?
Pick a category or example, share your experiences, and identify a promising direction. Possible examples:

Inquiry platforms

• Web-based Inquiry Science Environment
• Inquiry Island—avatars. Users or designers enter content.
• Theory: Constructivism, knowledge integration

Concept maps and other knowledge structuring resources

• Hypercard
• Inspiration
• Theory: Ausabel, knowledge structuring

Tutors

• Cognitive tutor & Carnegie learning
• Theory: ACT theory + Immediate feedback.

Collaborative learning

• CSILE: Collaborative learning where users enter the content
• Blogs, wikis, collaborative spaces
• Theory: Zone of proximal development

Modeling environments and research tools [use or construct]

• Intermedia: Inquiry modeling environments for specific problems
• Thinkertools: Guided inquiry
• NetLogo: Models
• Agent Sheets: Modeling tool
• PhET: Models and some guidance
• Model-It: Modeling tool
• Molecular Workbench
• Biokids: Explore diversity in the environment
• Theory: Varies, includes exploration, active learning, scaffolded inquiry

What is working: Examples [5 minute presentations]

• Michelle Williams – WISE Genetics
• Doug Clark –SURGE  
• Uri Wilensky WISE and NetLogo  [not confirmed]
• Jenny Chiu and Charles Xie –WISE Engineering  
• Chris Dede –Platforms like Time to Know  

How can we collaborate to sustain innovation?
Many alternative approaches compete for the attention of K-12 decision makers. These include some technology-based curriculum materials that support lectures and transmission of information such as Kahn Academy videos, multiple choice questions for clickers, PowerPoint slides for teachers, and eTextbooks. They also include new technologies that support current practice (like Smartboards) and transmission of information (like Clickers). Decision makers also often select technologies such as tablets, smart phones, or computers without considering the software they will need to make them successful.

• Bob Tinker: How to sustain innovations. Revenue streams.
• Marcia Linn: What are high priority needs?

Discussion: What are open questions and promising directions? How can we collaborate to stimulate change?

Wrap-up & closing: Report back from small groups

Session Materials: 

CE3 Handout.pdf

The purpose of this session is to engage participants in discussing and sharing strategies for designing classroom uses of data sets and visualization technologies, including large archives and portals of geospatial data sets, data from field sites, Web-based graphing and data analysis tools, and technologies that simulate a field environment. Each of these technologies and data sets is tied to curriculum and instructional resources. Many of the projects focus on the students’ local areas in order to build engagement and connect the data and scientific content to their prior knowledge, experience, and sense of connectedness to their environment. The projects primarily showcase uses of geospatial visualizations, which when representing authentic data, provide powerful resources for exercising spatial, temporal, quantitative, and concept-based reasoning about what is known and not known about scientific phenomena. In turn, such uses reinforce student understanding of how scientists determine which data to collect, how to collect them, when to collect them, and how to interpret and analyze them. Yet real data, whether from student field collection or from public archives and portals, can be “messy” and usually do not tell a simple story. Furthermore, there are tremendous challenges to using public data archives in science classrooms (e.g., user interface issues, data structures, technical vocabulary, and metadata incomprehensible to all but professional researchers and technicians), compounded by the rapid rate of technological change and increase in data volume.

Session goals include sharing the ways the projects employ these technologies in curriculum development and educator professional development, and ways in which learners are using these technologies to document and explore their world. Presenters seek to engage session participants in discussions of how other projects are using technological representations of field sites and planetary dynamics. The presenters lead development projects reaching a diverse range of grade levels and STEM courses on Earth and environmental science and ecology topics. Bodzin’s project, Promoting Spatial Thinking with Web-based Geospatial Technologies, uses Earth science investigations and support materials to build middle school students’ geospatial thinking skills and analysis capabilities. Zalles’ project, Studying Topography, Orographic Rainfall, and Ecosystems (STORE) with Geospatial Information Technology, employs Google Earth and ARC GIS Explorer Desktop software to study regional meteorology, ecosystem, and climate characteristics. Google Earth is also used in Almquist’s project, Cyber-enabled Earth Exploration: Development of Materials for Middle School Earth Science Instruction, for engaging middle school students in formulating claims, evidence, and reasoning to study volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics. Berkowitz and Wyner, of the projects Ecosystems and Evidence Project (Collaborative Research: Berkowitz), Data Explorations in Ecology Project (DEEP) and Ecology Disrupted: Using Real Scientific Data about Daily Life to Link Environmental Issues to Ecological Processes in Secondary School Science Classrooms (Collaborative Research: Wyner) respectively, describe case-based curricula using media and primary and secondary data to help New York City public school students study ecology and human influences. Short describes his project, Learning Science as Inquiry with the Urban Advantage: Formal-Informal Collaborations to Increase Science Literacy and Student Learning, and an ecology teaching case focusing on field research related to the zebra mussel invasion of the Hudson River ecosystem, employing Web-based graphing and data analysis tools. Field research is also the focus of Duggan-Haas’s project, Enhanced Earth System Teaching Through Regional and Local (ReaL) Earth Inquiry, in which teacher participants use a range of technologies to study and simulate field environments. Krumhansl (Oceans of Data: What is Needed to Support Students' Learning with Large Scientific Databases? (Collaborative Research: Krumhansl) provides conceptual anchors for how these projects can be viewed in light of what current cyber-infrastructures hold for supporting educational uses of data sets.