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June/July 2005 -
Vol. 2, Issue 6 Previous
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Resource of interest: DLESE Teaching Boxes
 Two
prototype ready-to-use DLESE Teaching Boxes are available for educators: Evidence
for Plate Tectonics, and
Essentials of Weather. Just what is a Teaching Box?
It is an online assembly of interrelated learning concepts,
digital resources, and cohesive narration that helps make connections
between individual resources and learning goals. Instructors and students
can pick a topic, view the concepts that build an understanding of that
topic, explore online resources that support learning of those concepts,
and benefit from the narration (the glue) that weaves concepts, activities,
and background information together into a complete teaching/learning story.
Students are excited to discover and engage their curiosity about science.
Additional Teaching Boxes on ocean and earthquake related topics are currently
under development.
A collaborative project among DLESE, the University of California's Berkeley
Museum of Paleontology, San Francisco State University, USGS, and seven San
Francisco area middle/high school teachers, the Teaching Box project holds
great promise as a powerful model for science teacher professional development.
Teaching Boxes provide a pathway for making science relevant to the daily lives
of educators and students by incorporating lessons around current Earth events
and real-time data. They are freely available online, are ready to use or adapt
for the classroom, and can support state and national standards.
Professional development
opportunity: SACNAS 2005 and K-12 Teacher Workshops
 The Society
for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) provides
leadership in expanding and improving opportunities for minorities in the
scientific workforce and in academic careers, and provides support for pre-college
science education, as well as student support programs and opportunities.
SACNAS activities include mentoring college students in science, math, and
engineering; online internship/job placement resources; and student chapters.
In conjunction with its annual conference, SACNAS offers K-12
Teacher Workshops, focused
on supporting teacher professional development, especially in the areas of
content knowledge and inquiry-based methodologies. SACNAS also offers a Teacher-Scientist
Partnership Initiative, which connects minority-serving K-12 educators with
research scientists for year-round collaboration via its
e-Mentoring
program. SACNAS
2005 national conference takes place in Denver from September
29- October 2, 2005. The pre-registration deadline for the conference is September
2, 2005.
See you at the DLESE 2005 Annual Meeting!
 We
look forward to meeting new attendees and seeing old friends at the DLESE
2005 Annual Meeting taking place July 9-12 in St. Petersburg, Florida. This
year's meeting is designed to provide multiple opportunities for
professional development, interaction and collaboration, and familiarization
with the library and its services. A variety of field trips, labs, workshops,
design review, and focus group sessions are integrated throughout the meeting
and take advantage of the great coastal location of the meeting host—the
College of Marine
Science at the University
of South Florida. Fifty
percent of this year's attendees are either new to DLESE or new to the Annual
Meeting, and activities that forward their participation include a matchmaking/mentoring
activity with experienced DLESE meeting attendees, three Newcomer sessions
on Saturday, July 9, and the DLESE In Action Forum on Saturday night that illustrates
a variety of ways that DLESE is utilized by community members.
Attendees
include K-12 educators, college, university, and community college faculty,
curriculum developers, data providers, web/software developers, scientific
researchers, librarians/media specialists, informal educators, and graduate
and undergraduate students. Social events include an opening reception on Friday
night at Clam Bayou House, a Taste of Tampa Bay dinner on campus Saturday night,
a Sunday night buffet in conjunction with the Share Fair at the Hilton, and
a concluding banquet with dancing on Monday night at the Pier Aquarium. Registration
is closed out at 207 attendees—if
you didn't get a chance to register for this year, we hope to see you at another
annual meeting in future!
JCDL 2005 a great success
 The 5th
Annual ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2005), held
in Denver from June 7-11, was a stimulating and enlivening event, emphasizing
the vision and potential of digital libraries to influence knowledge
creation and to themselves serve as unique sociocultural phenomena. The conference
theme of Digital Libraries: Cyberinfrastructure for
Research and Education offered a three-pronged technical program exploring
digital libraries and cyberinfrastructure (technological underpinnings
and impacts on research and education); users and interaction (how users
work and learn with digital library technologies); and tools and techniques
(new architectures and frameworks, retrieval techniques, and resource characterization).
Thought-provoking addresses by Conference Chair Mary Marlino; and keynote
speakers Deana Markum, Associate Librarian for Library Services of the Library
of Congress; Guy (Bud) Tribble, Vice President of Software Technology for
Apple Computer; and Hector Garcia-Molina, of the Departments of Computer
Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University sparked discussion
on the issues and challenges facing digital libraries, and were memorable
features of the meeting. The conference was jointly hosted by DLESE, the
National Science Digital Library (NSDL), and the University of Colorado Department
of Computer Science. Look for a full report on the conference by Program
Co-Chair Tamara Sumner in the July/August issue of DLib
Magazine, due out July 15.
DLESE Ambassador program fall training
DLESE Community Services will conduct training workshops for
new DLESE
K-12 Ambassadors at each National
Science Teachers Association (NSTA)
regional convention this fall. Specifically, they will be held on the Saturday
afternoons of October 22 in Hartford, Connecticut; November 12 in Chicago,
Illinois; and December 3 in Nashville, Tennessee. Ambassadors program
funding is limited to providing support for individual outreach
efforts in each Ambassador's respective state (i.e. funds are not available
to bring teachers to the respective NSTA conventions for the workshops).
Bryan Aivazian will lead the workshops that will prepare selected teachers
for outreach efforts in their states. Each teacher who undergoes
the training agrees to make at least one presentation a year for the
next two years at conferences and workshops in their state. If you or a teacher
you know would like more information about becoming an Ambassador in your
state, please contact Bryan Aivazian at bryana@trib.com
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