Since 1991 the Toyota Tapestry Program has awarded more than $8 million to 986 teams of teachers for innovative science classroom projects. Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. and the National Science Teachers Association are pleased to announce the 19th Toyota TAPESTRY Grants for Science Teachers program. This year, 50 large grants of up to $10,000 each and 20-32 mini-grants of up to $2,500 will be awarded to K-12 teachers of science in the United States. The categories are Physical Science Application, Environmental Science Education, and Integrating Literacy and Science.

Earlier this year Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc. recognized 78 science teachers from across the country  with $550,000 in grants via the Toyota Tapestry Program at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) National Conference on Science Education held in Boston, Mass.

(From Toyota Tapestry Registration and Eligibility guidelines)

Environmental Science Education

Projects are funded in the Environmental Science Education category that emphasize the efficient use of natural resources and protection of the environment. Students participating in these projects should gain an increased awareness of the terrestrial, aquatic, and/or atmospheric environment and an understanding of their own interdependence with the natural world.

Physical Science Applications

Projects are funded in the Physical Science Applications category that relate the laws, principles, and concepts of science (physics and chemistry) to phenomena and events relevant to students’ lives, and should involve students’ own experiences and interests.

Integrating Literacy & Science

This category focuses on inquiry-based science projects that incorporate effective strategies and techniques of teacher practice for the development of language arts and reading literacy. Exemplary projects include the application of the National Science Education Standards, the use of expository and informative text, academic language development, and oral and written communication skills. These projects, which can be in any science content area, must make strong connections between teaching science and research-based literacy strategies, provide evidence of hands-on/minds-on investigations and ongoing assessment opportunities.

This Web Seminar will focus on dynamic online resources you can use to teach your students about the chemistry of water through the NSDL Chemical Education Digital Library. Join presenters Dr. John Moore, W. T. Lippincott Professor and director of the Institute for Chemical Education, and Dr. Lynn Diener, Assistant Professor, Mount Mary College in Milawaukee, Wisconsin and guests Jon Holmes, Editor of Journal of Chemical Education Online and Dr. James Skinner, Chemistry Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for this seminar for educators of grades 9-12.

Register for this free seminar: http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/SeminarRegistration.aspx

Learn more about NSDL NSTA Web Seminars: http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/symposia_seminars/NSDL3/Webseminar4.aspx

As the nation goes to the polls on November 4, 2008 these resources from NSDL Pathways, which provide access to audience-specific views of appropriate NSDL resources and services, offer classroom information about how voting and polls work, insights into American election milestones, and a closer look at how the technology behind voting can affect history.

Cast your ballot on November 4.

Annenberg/CPB: Cast Your Vote

From the NSDL Middle School Portal: Math and Science Pathways

Multiple polls claim to know how public opinion shifts day-to-day during political campaigns. This web site offers a ficticious look into an election campaign at the math behind the polls. Concepts such as random sampling, margin of error, confidence intervals, and ways in which surveys can go wrong are reviewed.

Majority Vote: What percentage does it take to win a vote?

From the NSDL Middle School Portal: Math and Science Pathways

Understanding national election results is complicated. This classroom activity helps students think carefully about how percentages are used mathematically to determine voting outcomes. The importance of understanding the meaning of percentages in media and marketing is also noted.

Voting Rights

From NSDL Teachers’ Domain: Digital Media Resources Pathway

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed that prohibited racial discrimination in voting was passed in 1870. The Voting Rights Act, however, was not signed into law until 1965. Find out what happened in the nearly one hundred years between 1870 and 1965 to ensure that everyone has the right to vote in this multimedia resource from Teacher’s Domain.

Election 2000: A Case Study in Human Factors and Design

From the NSDL Engineering Pathway: Engineering Education Resources

The goal in presenting this case based on controversies surrounding the November 2000 presidential election, specifically the difficulties encountered in interpreting imperfectly punched ballots, is to help college-level students recognize how engineering solutions can be brought to bear in solving problems of national importance.

Each year NSDL’s NEEDS/Engineering Pathway digital libraries host The Premier Award competition. A wide range of submissions of high-quality, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education are encouraged. Recently the 2008 Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware was awarded to Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Natalie Linnell, Craig Prince and members of the development team from the University of Washington for Classroom Presenter. The award was presented at the Premier Award Ceremony at the Frontiers in Education Conference, held this year in Saratoga Springs, New York.  

 2008 Premier Award Courseware was distributed on CD Rom at the FIE Conference and is also available online.

Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC-based interaction system that supports the sharing of digital ink on slides between instructors and students by enabling the flexible delivery of lecture content. When used as a presentation tool, Classroom Presenter allows the integration of digital ink and electronic slides, making it possible to combine the advantages of whiteboard style and slide-based presentation. The ability to link the instructor and student devices, and to send information back and forth provides a mechanism for introducing active learning into the classroom and creates additional feedback channels. 

This year’s panel of judges comprised a diverse cross-section of experts in engineering education and interactive media. Sponsors of the award program are John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Microsoft Research and TechSmith. 

Richard Anderson is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and also serves as Associate Chair of educational programs. He won the 2007 UW Faculty Innovator for Teaching Award. Ruth Anderson teaches Computer Science at the University of Washington.  Natalie Linnell and Craig Prince are both PhD students at University of Washington working on educational technology with Richard Anderson.

Submissions for 2009 are due by July 17, 2009, and the Premier Courseware of 2009 will be announced at the Frontiers In Education Conference to be held October 18-21 in San Antonio, Texas.  More details on the Premier Award and current and previous winners can be found on the Engineering Pathway at: http://www.engineeringpathway.org/ep/premier/

The Engineering Pathway (www.engineeringpathway.org) is a portal to high-quality teaching and learning resources in applied science and math, engineering, computer science/information technology and engineering technology, for use by K-12 and university educators and students. Engineering Pathway is the engineering education “wing” of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) at www.nsdl.org.

“Periodic Table Live!” is a notable new resource from the Chemical Education Digital Library (ChemEd DL). Students and teachers especially are invited to interact with the periodic table, chose an element of interest, and learn all sorts of interesting information about that element–from details of its discovery, to its industrial uses and other characteristics. Users also learn about different physical (ie. boiling point, melting point, hardness) and atomic properties (ie. ionization energies, electronegativity, atomic radius) of elements. You can see pictures, view videos of reactions, and play around with 3-dimensional crystal structure(s) of elements. An additional function of the periodic table is its ability to chart and sort. You can choose a certain property (or many properties) of a selection of elements, and see how they compare based on where the element is on the periodic table. Periodic Table Live! is useful way to teach students about periodic trends.

Periodic Table Live! features excellent information about the elements, but you can help make it even better. Each element description is also available from the ChemEd Collaborative, the ChemEd DL wiki at http://wiki.chemeddl.org/index.php/PTL:Elements as are the short chemist biographies at http://wiki.chemeddl.org/index.php/PTL:Chemists. We invite you to collaborate with us through use of the wiki to make Periodic Table Live! as good as it can be by sharing your expertise. Currently images of minerals of the elements are being added to the wiki. Why not join the ChemEdDL team in helping to create the best periodic table on the Web?

Along with a series of six Project SUCCEED Saturday Explorations workshops beginning on October 18 in Durham, NC, Robert M. Panoff, Shodor Executive Director, and staff members will also offer parallel workshop sessions on “Computational Thinking–Sources and Resources for Quantitative Reasoning in Math and Science Education.” These workshops are being offered to math and science teachers in multiple locations in Illinois, and Georgia this month including one at the Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC) in Asheville, NC which is being jointly sponsored by NSDL. This professional development workshop for math and science teachers in a 16-county western region of North Carolina, will explore a variety of free and low-cost sources for modeling tools from the Computational Science Education Reference Desk, a Pathways project of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

Panoff explains, “Computational science continues to advance the accurate description and prediction of the dynamics of the world around us. Moving “beyond PowerPointless-ness,” we have the opportunity to help students see that computing really matters. Computing “matters” because quantitative reasoning, computational thinking, and multiscale modeling are the intellectual “heart and soul” of 21st Century science and therefore are the essential skills of the 21st Century workforce. Computing “matters” because it moves students others have identified as “at risk” to students self-identified as “capable, motivated, and employable.” Computing “matters” because we can demonstrate the power of interactive computing to help students and teachers reach a deeper understanding and application of math and science. Computing “matters” because the computational tools integrated with curriculum are both the content of education and the most effective method.”

More information is available here.

Ending two and a half days of networking, sharing research results, project outcomes and swapping good stories, almost 200 NSDL partners and projects said goodbye and headed home from Washington D.C. on October 2 to continue building NSDL’s capacity as a national platform for cyberlearning. Presentations will be downloadable from the Annual Meeting Full Schedule Overview as they become available over the next few weeks. A list of attendees, poster abstracts, and other materials may be found here.

Top left to right: NSDL Resource Center Director Kaye Howe addresses participants; 2008 Annual Meeting Chair Sarah Holsted reads Haiku while 2009 Annual Meeting Chair Susan Jesuroga listens; attendees discuss 2009 Annual Meeting priorities.

NSF NSDL Program Director Lee Zia has traditionally shared Haiku written especially to echo some of the meeting themes to mark the end of each year’s NSDL Annual Meeting. This year’s collection was penned by members of the NSDL community and delivered by Sarah Holsted, NSDL Annual Meeting 2008 Chair:

CHANGE

Stage Two Proposal

Induces insane review;

CSERD marches on.

–Bob Panoff

From the red embers

of Core Dis-Integration,

what Phoenix rises?

–James Blake

PROCESS

Verification

Validation of science

Accreditation.

–Bob Panoff

Deadlines pass quickly

Networked angel nags online

Holsted saves again

–Sherry Hsi

DATA

Three million page views

Month after month after month

Computational.

–Bob Panoff

Sifting though content

Endless searches return piles

Metadata please

–Sherry Hsi

Metrics waft like snow

Whipped about by unknown souls

While I shovel the path

–Bob Donahue

TRANSITION & FUTURE

Monkeys, monkeys run!

Through the jungle laptops come

Swinging in rhythm

–Sherry Hsi

Cheers! (A Haiku in Appreciation of Lee Zia)

Up late… idea:

Transform STEM world-online… To

Do: NSDL!

–Sarah Holsted

NSDL’s Annual Meeting is set to take place from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, 2008 in Washington, D.C. This year, the program focuses on the complementary efforts of mature NSDL projects in a format developed to highlight the collective work from NSDL projects. Achievments in professional development and outreach with K12 and higher education audiences; and, in web-based services that allow educators and learners to use, and re-use, the burgeoning collections in NSDL and NSDL Pathways will be presented. Look for news, notes and impressions in the NSDL Annual Meeting blog.

The program also highlights NSDL projects’ efforts to employ high-speed networks that enable the delivery and use of rich media content, identify the usage data that supports webmetric analysis of networks, and facilitate connections between personal and organizational networks to further the use of online content in support of STEM education. Two poster sessions and a Lightning Talk session will provide opportunities for new and returning projects to mingle, and a plenary session of the meeting completes the transition to a new leadership structure for NSDL with the advent of a Resource Center and a Technical Network Services Provider. Annual Meeting handouts including NSDL Pathways Highlights and NSDL Project Updates are available from the Annual Meeting website.

Teachers work to connect broad learning concepts, standards and educational resources in K12 classrooms to ensure that their students’ progress is both developmentally sound and measurable. The new version of the National Science Digital Library’s Science Literacy Map (SLM) tool is an easy-to-use service that finds and presents students  with the right resource at just the right moment. SLM provides visualizations for how learning concepts, standards, and educational resources are interrelated. In addition teachers can access the right classroom resources in time to teach science,  technology, engineering and mathematics concepts linked to associated education standards for students at different stages of learning. Now the Science Literacy Map tool also provides one-click access to associated background research on common student misconceptions.

 The NSDL Science Literacy Map Tool:

 • Zeros in on content aligned to to AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy–Atlas for Science Literacy;
• Provides just-in-time quality resources about a specific topic and;
• Presents quick, user-friendly views of of related benchmarks and teaching points.

Under the Swiss Alps this week beams of protons known as Hadrons circled the 27 kilometers of the most powerful particle accelerator (the CERN Large Hadron Collider) in the world for the first time. As those protons begin to collide scientists expect to learn more about dark matter and how mass exists. This NSDL resource features an animation from CERN that illustrates how protons move and collide in the LHC. To understand more about why physicists are so interested in the results of the collision of sub atomic particles at high speeds, however, you might want to listen to the CERN scientists explain it in their own unique way–the “Large Hadron Rap” is now playing on You Tube–current views 2,726,813.

What’s the down side? There is concern that there could be unforeseen consequences when particles begin colliding in October–like the generation of micro black holes, for example. Although the CERN Large Hadron Collider is the biggest so far, it is not the first. While exciting discoveries are eagerly anticipated from the LHC, no disruption is expected from what amounts to this very big physics experiment.