ED013-02
Blending distance education resources and expertise to offer professional development to teachers via Project Atmosphere

Tuesday, 8 December 2020: 20:37
Virtual
Liz Baugher, American Meteorological Society Washington DC, Washington, DC, United States, Wendy E Abshire, AMS-Education Program, Washington, DC, United States, Chad Kauffman, California University of Pennsylvania, Earth Sciences, California, PA, United States, Jessica Taylor, NASA Langley, Newport News, VA, United States, Marile Colon-Robles, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States and Lori A. Schultz, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, United States
Recorded Presentation
Abstract:
As communication and educational materials have evolved from printed textbooks and hands-on learning tools to digital books and interactive apps, so too have American Meteorological Society (AMS) Education course materials.

In 2020, AMS Education partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to offer the 27th Project Atmosphere summer professional development opportunity for teachers. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, this year's course was delivered 100% online with a new “virtual-residency” week complementing the other 5 weeks of online instruction.This year's virtual-residency presentations include numerous leaders from supportive organizations within NOAA, such as the Storm Prediction Center, National Weather Service, National Hurricane Center, to name a few and NASA, such as the Earth Science Disasters program, Applied Remote Sensing Training (ARSET) and GLOBE Clouds.

Using an organization’s application to guide participants in new ways of interacting with real-time data helps to improve teaching and learning in the K-12 environment. For example, the GLOBE Observer application, a NASA sponsored citizen science app, provides our teacher participants with the opportunity to participate in crowd-sourced data collection and engage in the scientific process, reflect on feedback presented through corresponding satellite data, and contribute to a global cloud database. During Project Atmosphere, the teacher cohort was trained virtually in the GLOBE Clouds protocol by GLOBE Trainers from NASA and the teachers formed a GLOBE team, which allowed them to see the observations submitted by one another. GLOBE Clouds’s email feedback to participants showed a comparison of their observations to measurements collected by various satellites. Discussion of the various images occurred in real-time, but also ensured that teachers learned the crowd source process for future lesson plan ideas.

The AMS program will continue to adapt as new best practices for adult learning emerge by collaborating with offerings supported by multiple organizations which help to increase the efficiency of implementing an online course.

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