1. Helping Educators Find Visualizations and Teaching Materials Just-in-Time
Good afternoon. My name is John McDaris and I work at the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. Today I’ll be talking to you about how one of our projects has been successful in responding to the powerful teachable moments presented to geoscience educators by several large geoscience events that have occurred over the last year.
John R. McDaris, Science Education Resource Center, Carleton College
Cathy Manduca, Science Education Resource Center, Carleton College
Heather Macdonald, College of William and Mary

2. CREDIT: NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team
Hurricane Katrina
August 28, :20 AM EDT
Indian Ocean Tsunami
Major events and natural disasters provide geoscience educators with great opportunities to engage their students with class content. The last year has provided several such opportunities: a tsunami, a record-breaking and devastating hurricane season, massive earthquakes. But in order to make the most of these opportunities, educators need quality topical resources related to current earth science events.
NOAA -
CREDIT: NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team

3. On the Cutting Edge: Faculty Development Program
Teaching Geoscience with Visualizations
One of the projects that our staff at SERC contribute to is the On the Cutting Edge Faculty Development Program which helps geoscience faculty stay up-to-date with both geoscience research and teaching methods. In February 2004, On the Cutting Edge hosted a workshop at Carleton entitled Teaching Geoscience with Visualizations: Using Images, Animations, and Models Effectively. The workshop brought together geoscience educators, researchers, and cognitive scientists to talk about issues surrounding the use of visualizations in the classroom. A good deal of research has been done into how to effectively use both new and old visualization technologies and facilitating the conversation between researchers and educators was an important next step.
At SERC, we developed a website based on the discussions and outcomes of this workshop. The website also aggregates essays by participants, researcher websites, recommended reading lists and other types of information. But the heart of the site is a browseable and searchable series of pages that contain collections of links to visualizations related to specific geoscience topics. We scaled these collections so that each one is devoted to a topic that geoscience faculty are likely be able to cover in one or two class periods. The intent with was to make it easy for faculty and educators to find visualization materials on geoscience topics to be used in teaching and outreach.

4. The Power of Visualizations
Ability to Tell Stories
Ability to Explore and Understand Data
I want to mention briefly why visualizations are such an important focus in terms of educational value.
First, Using Visualizations helps us to Tell Stories: Geoscience faculty use visualizations of observation and model data to describe various parts of the earth. These are often linked together or animated to develop an understanding of Earth processes with twin goals of understanding the nature of the process and its role in the Earth system.
Using Visualizations can also aid in Exploring and Understanding Data: Scientists have long known the power of visualizations in making sense of data and thereby learning about the earth. With new access to on-line data and new technologies for visualizing data, this is becoming an increasingly powerful technique for teaching geoscience.
ETE -
NOAA -

5. The Tsunami Collection
Visualizations Relating To:
2004 Earthquake and Tsunami
Other Historic Tsunamis
Hypothetical/Model Tsunamis
Kenji Satake -
At the beginning of January, 2005, we noticed an increased volume of traffic to one of these collection pages involving Plate Tectonic Movements. This seemed to indicate an interest in knowing more about how the tsunami was generated. So, we decided to put together a collection of visualizations related specifically to tsunamis and to publicize it to educators through the GeoEd listserv.
The collection was developed by searching through pages of Google returns and database searches looking for the kinds of visualizations that would be of use. Resources were drawn from researchers, government agencies and respected media outlets and selected to provide a variety of different types of visualizations such as photos, animations and satellite imagery. And they were selected to cover not only this tsunami, but also to highlight visualizations and models that have been developed based on previous tsunami events, as well as research into hypothetical events.
Miho Aoki -

6. Visitors to Tsunami Collection January through March
2/2/05: Cool Site of the Day
From the release of the site through the end of March, 2005, over 72,000 visitors came to the tsunami visualization collection. Comparing this figure with the approximately 7,000 geoscience faculty in the US shows that the population of users that came to the site went well beyond university professors. We can also tell from our web statistics that more than 8,700 of those visitors were repeat visitors. To put these numbers into perspective, the other collections of visualizations each get on the order of 2,000 visits per month. Looking at it another way, traffic to this one page represented about half of the traffic coming to all of our websites combined during this period. To date, there have been 134,000 visitors to this collection.

7. The Hurricane Collection
Visualizations Relating To:
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
2005 Hurricane Season in General
Other Historic Hurricanes
Model Hurricanes and Reconstructions of Past Storms
So, when this year’s hurricane season swung into high gear with the build up to Hurricane Katrina, we decided to develop a page of Hurricane visualizations along the same lines as the Tsunami collection. Due to the unusual amount of hurricane activity, this page has been revised a number of times of the last several months, first to include Hurricane Rita, then Hurricane Wilma, then links to information about the season as a whole.
One really satisfying aspect of constructing these collections was increasing the visibility of the quality research that geoscientists at several institutions have been doing in the field of visualizations for many years. We encouraged educators to submit resources they used in their classes for inclusion on the pages, whether these were additional websites or activities and supporting materials that made use of visualizations. We also asked the community to comment on the resources that were already on the page. By combining these two avenues of growth, the collections have become more complete and of higher quality.

8. Visitors to Hurricane Collection September and October
Katrina
Rita
Wilma
The Hurricane Visualizations Collection has received more than visitors since August of 2005, of which around 1350 are repeat visitors. Here again it seems likely that the visitors include a broader range of people than just university faculty. Other educators and the general public are seeking information on these current events. Thus we can see that these collections provide an effective mechanism for guiding the public to quality resources created by geoscience researchers and institutions, in addition to supporting incorporation of geoscience research in education.
This graph of visitors to the Hurricane Collection is one of the clearest illustrations I’ve seen of the teachable moment associated with major events. The three spikes in traffic correspond very well with the three major hurricanes that hit the United States in the last few months. Whether these visitors were instructors looking for materials for their classes or regular citizens trying to understand what was happening along the Gulf Coast, this graph clearly shows increased interest in hurricanes during this period of unusual activity. On the flips side, you can also see how quickly attention moves on to the next important issue. Striking while the iron is how is obviously very important.

9. As a final note, we think this model of quick response to current events has great promise to contribute to both formal and informal geoscience education. A window of opportunity opens when the whole world turns its collective eye to major event or natural disaster. It is in the best interest of geoscience educators at all levels to try and make the most of these brief periods of intense interest, and a key aspect of this will be providing them with easy access to the resources that will help them.
We have extensive collections of geoscience visualizations in place and we plan to continue helping educators find quality resources when current events spark that important teachable moment.

10. Teaching Geoscience with Visualizations
Google Search Terms:
teaching with visualizations
visualizations
10) Thank you very much.