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Last Updated: Sep 25th, 2005 - 15:10:09 |
Elementary Exchange: Linking across the Arctic Circle
At a time when you think that you can’t add one more thing to your curriculum, you might find a quick and easy way to bring the Polar Regions into your classroom through the “Windows Around the World” web-based exchange program. Dr. Juanita Urban-Rich, an oceanographer/ scientist, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, has developed (with funding through the National Science Foundation Geosciences Education) a program to enable students to learn about the cultures in different regions. This program also encourages students to learn about the geography, ecology, climate, and life in other regions of the world, as well as to develop math skills (e.g., interpreting graphs, integers, percentages). Two schools from the Arctic, North West Territories, Canada, and one school in Franklin, Massachusetts, exchanged data and email this past year. This year, West Elementary, in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee will also participate. To learn more about this program, go to http://jurbin.es.umb.edu.
Overview:
The "Windows around the World" is a web-based exchange program that links elementary schools around the world. The objectives of the program are to:
Promote learning about environmental science and cultural geography
Make vastly separated areas accessible to children & parents in other regions
Foster international collaboration and a sense of global unity
Start to obtain climate data in regions where global climate change will first have impacts
Make students (future leaders and workers) active participants in the study
We invite you to:
come look out the windows and see what it is like today at the different schools,
see what the students are recording
explore the data collected during the 2004-2005 academic year.
Special Features:
Data Entry:
Every day students take turns entering the temperature and weather conditions at their school. This data is stored in the database and is available for classroom projects and observation. When the students go to the data entry page, they see "filmstrips" of hourly images at all of the participating schools. This allows the students to see the differences in environmental conditions between the different regions.
Data Viewing:
Students and teachers have several tools available for looking at the data that they have been collecting throughout the year. The first tool for accessing the data is a dynamic charting system that allows the users to create weekly, monthly and yearly charts. By selecting the time period to chart and the schools that they want to view, students can create charts on the fly that demonstrate differences in temperature in different regions. Also, since this is an international program, students can choose between Metric and English units for all data retrieval.
The students and teachers also have direct access to the data in tabular format. Again, they can choose the time frame and schools to include when selecting the data. Once they have chosen which data they would like to retrieve, they can copy and paste it into other applications such as Excel.
Filmstrip Viewing:
Viewing a full day of images as a filmstrip allows students to see how environmental conditions change over time. Within a day they can see storm fronts come through as the sky goes from clear to overcast, they can see the sun rise or the moon set and can see how the light quality changes. Stacking the filmstrips vertically in chronological order, students can see how the length of day changes throughout the year. Students can choose which months they want to see filmstrips and the interval they would like to see; daily, weekly, or bi-monthly.
Archive Images
Images taken from the cameras every hour are stored and cataloged in the database. All images can be retrieved for use in the classroom or to view special events such as sunrises, moon rises, extreme weather, changes in vegetation and animal visitors. If teachers would like a large set of images, they can request to have them sent on CD as well.
© 2005, Juanita Urban-Rich
University of Massachusetts, Boston
© Copyright by IceNews.org
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