Title,Recipient,Competition,"Fiscal Year","Award Number","Federal Funding","Principal Investigator",State,City,County,District,Lat/Long,"Grant Dates",Abstract,Partners "Signals of Spring - ACES [Animals in Curriculum-bases Ecosystem Studies]","U.S. Satellite Laboratory","2006: Environmental Literacy",2006,NA06SEC4690006,"$599,862","Glen Schuster","New York",Rye,Westchester,NY16,"40.98353, -73.68647","2006-10-01T00:00:00 - 2009-09-30T00:00:00","Signals of Spring ACES (Animals in Curriculum-based Ecosystem Studies), will use NOAA remote sensing data with curriculum-based activities for middle and high school students (see http://www.signalsofspring.net/aces/). Students use Earth imagery to explain the movement of animals that are tracked by satellite with NOAA's ARGOS monitoring system. The project addresses the issues surrounding the animals and environments of NOAA's National Marine Sanctuaries (NMS). Comprehensive teacher professional development will be delivered both onsite and online for 250 teachers. The project will impact 20,000 students and parents. Ten curriculum modules will be delivered to students, accompanied with an investigation of El Nino and animals, as well as ocean life and global climate change. ACES will provide classrooms with the curricular area of conservation and the ecological issues surrounding the ocean, using marine animals as the engaging component. Students will apply NOAA Earth data to animal migrations and the critical environmental issues that face these animals that are of depleting populations. Once teachers and students have the necessary skills to interpret data, students will perform the ACES investigations.","Eureka City Schools / Eureka High School, Oakland Unified School District / Oakland High School, Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, Shoreline Unified School District / Tomales High School, Stanford University / Graduate School of Education, Sunnyvale School District (SSD) / Stanley B. Ellis Elementary School, Columbia University / Teachers College, Newark Public Schools District / Ann Street School, University of Washington (UW) / School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences, Wheelock College (WhaleNet)" "Bringing Knowledge of Planet Earth to a Wider Audience and Bringing a Diverse New Group to Careers in Science Teaching","University of Colorado Boulder / Fiske Planetarium","2006: Science On a Sphere Installation Cooperative Agreements",2006,NA06SEC4690012,"$99,966","Douglas Duncan",Colorado,Boulder,Boulder,CO02,"40.00758, -105.26594","2006-10-01T00:00:00 - 2007-09-30T00:00:00","Science On a Sphere (SOS) at Fiske Planetarium will raise awareness and understanding of Earth system science for over 30,000 visitors per year, using student docents and newly-developed, tested pedagogy. SOS will enhance Fiske’s ability to engage 3,000 university students and 30,000 K-12 students and members of the public. A student docent program will transform the traditionally passive experience of a planetarium visit into an interactive learning opportunity. The docents will be drawn from two sources: undergraduates who will be future science teachers, who we take from a selective CU program called ""STEM-TP"", and Hispanic university and high school students taught by Fiske's planetarium manager Francisco Salas. Docents will talk with visitors and help them understand key science issues that affect the earth, leading to more informed decision-making. Fiske will develop bilingual pedagogical material and new data sets, and share them with NOAA and SOS sites. To support the docents, and visiting students and teachers, Fiske Education Manager Traub-Metlay will lead development of explanatory materials that challenge visitors and provide context for what they are seeing. These will be translated into Spanish by Fiske Manager Salas. New data sets, contributed by faculty members, will expand the range of SOS, into space, adding solar interior models, the celestial sphere, and the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang, along with new terrestrial data such as the worldwide distribution of forest fires. SOS will become a focal point in Fiske's longstanding tradition of teacher workshops, which are often done in cooperation with the University of Colorado and NOAA scientists and highlight NOAA’s role monitoring the earth and sun. It also will be integrated with a small suite of hands-on exhibits we are installing that explains how observations can be made in infrared, ultraviolet, and X-rays in addition to visible light. These would complement SOS, which features multi-wavelength data. Fiske and its Boulder Colorado-area partners have raised $75,000 to cover the full cost of SOS hardware, and have formal institutional commitments to long-term program development. This award from NOAA will go into materials development, evaluation, and student pay. Colorado communities are aware of NOAA’s important work and the nearby David Skaggs Center, but security measures make it difficult to visit there. Fiske is much more accessible. Fiske will improve the usefulness of all SOS sites by conducting formative evaluation to assess what kinds of SOS presentations work best with public and school audiences, giving feedback to NOAA and all SOS users.","Nature Conservancy Headquarters, University of Colorado Boulder / Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)"