COSEE logo                       
 
Network News
June 2008
 
CNN Vol. 1, No. 6
 
 
 
In This Issue
Focus On... COSEE-Central Gulf of Mexico
Feature Story: OOS Workshops
Network Announcements
Interim National Leadership Team Update
Work Group Updates
COSEE Network Calendar
CNN Schedule
COSEE Center Directory
Focus On... COSEE-Central Gulf of Mexico
written by Sharon Walker
photographs courtesy of COSEE-CGOM

Projects and Programs
Mississippi and Florida will each be hosting the annual Summer Institute. The six-day Face to Face component will be held June 22-27, in both locations concurrently. The Mississippi Institute will be hosted by the J.L. Scott Marine Education Center (MEC) in Ocean Springs, and will involve 14 middle school teachers and 7 scientists. The Florida Summer Institute, hosted by the University of Florida's Marine Lab on Seahorse Key, will involve 12 teachers and seven scientists. Working in three-person teams (two teachers and one scientist), these participants will share enhanced scientific content and pedagogical skills.

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Florida Institute participants studying marsh plants

These Summer Institutes are intense, placed-based, and field-oriented; they include the development of five to seven professional development activities, which the teachers share with their peers upon returning to their respective schools in the fall. The Institute's focus each summer is based on enhanced oceanography and coastal processes content, strengthening instructional skills, and developing lesson plans/activities that are aligned with the National Science Education Standards (NSES) and the Ocean Literacy Essential Principles and Fundamental Concepts. 

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Mississippi Institute shark dissection at the old aquarium

Following the six-day Face-to-Face Institutes, the teachers are then engaged over a three-week timeframe, spending two weeks (July 7-25) involved in the Online Institute component. This component encompasses presentations, reading assignments, videos made by six additional research scientists, social scientists, and/or educators. (See statisistics and reviews from the 2007 online component.)This summer, the online component will feature the following: an Introduction to the Gulf of Mexico, Aquaculture, Coastal Resiliency, Global Information System Technology, Marine Debris, and Environmental Stewardship. Teacher-participants also develop an activity on each of these topics. We are very pleased that this year our NSF Program Managers will be attending the COSEE-CGOM Institutes for a site visit!

In Fall 2008, at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama and at the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans, COSEE-CGOM co-PIs will each host a two-day workshop for informal and formal educators, media professionals, and scientists. Up to 40 participants will be engaged in these workshops.  

In October 2008, the COSEE-CGOM 12-member Management Team will be involved in the Communicating Ocean Sciences to Informal Audiences (COSIA) Professional Development Workshop, implemented by COSEE-California through a NOAA Environmental Literacy grant, and held at the Marine Education Center in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. The Management Team hopes to implement COSIA in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana for the spring semester 2009.

The Sea Scholars program will be implemented aboard one of the U.S. Navy's 329-foot oceanographic survey ships in early 2009. This effort will be a component of the JASON Project. The COSEE-CGOM award, funded by NSF, has leveraged funding by NOAA and the U.S. Navy into a model collaboration since its inception in 2003.

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Sea Scholars deploying instrumentation on deck

Communications
The COSEE-CGOM quarterly electronic newsletter began in March 2008, and the next issue will be disseminated in July. The COSEE-CGOM website is currently undergoing updates and revisions to complement and better align with the changes being made to COSEE.net.

Evaluation
The COSEE-CGOM Internal and External Evaluators have been administering, analyzing, and interpreting pre- and post-tests and Likert-scale evaluations, as well as conducting interviews and implementing post-Institute evaluations with three teachers in each state and select scientists, since 2006. These evaluators, in collaboration with the COSEE-CGOM Management Team and through input from the COSEE-CGOM Advisory Board, have developed and implemented several electronic evaluations, administered to all 2003-2007 participants, thereby strengthening overall evaluation efforts. These data have been or are being analyzed and interpreted. 

Outreach
The COSEE-CGOM Management Team has also been involved in working with two Master's degree students and one Doctoral student. The Master's degree students have been involved in the evaluation process, and the Doctoral student is involved in updating the COSEE-CGOM data base and surveying teachers concerning the use of lesson plans and interactions with our scientists.

The Informal Centers, through which the Co-PIs are affiliated, have been a "win-win" partnership for a wide range of audiences, i.e., classroom teachers, their students, the general public, scientists, media professionals, and informal educators, as well as the COSEE-CGOM Management Team and Advisory Board. All participants are involved in enhanced content knowledge. The teachers have increased their pedagogical skills and the participating scientists better understand teachers' professional needs, state and national standards, and the manner in which children learn.

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Mississippi festival touch tank and K-12 Coastal Ecology Camp are just two examples of COSEE-CGOM outreach
Feature Story:
COSEE Ocean Observing Systems (OOS) Workshops
by Jane Lee

'Tis the season - summer is fast approaching and that means school is out. Students have wandered off to summer camp or summer school or have taken to testing the limits of their thumbs as they frantically battle digital foes on their televisions. Teachers are breathing a sigh of relief and contemplating their next move. Should they leave it all behind and take up residence in a shack on the beach, or forge ahead and rack up another course in their quest for professional development?

For the teachers who choose the latter, many of the COSEE centers are holding Ocean Observing Systems (OOS) workshops - and collaborating with each other to do so - in order to help with familiarizing teachers with the data and with learning how to use those data in the classroom.

COSEE-Coastal Trends is joining forces with COSEE-Great Lakes to offer a Real Time Aquatic Data Workshop, July 14-17 at the F.T. Stone Laboratory on Gibraltar Island, located on Lake Erie. This week-long workshop is open to teachers of grades 7 through 12 and focuses on working with scientists, learning to incorporate real-time data into the classroom, performing hands-on activities, and networking with other educators. Application deadline was April 15, 2008.

COSEE-Networked Ocean World is conducting an OOS-related teacher workshop for the second year. These workshops are part of a two-year project funded by the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office's Bay Watershed Education and Training grant program, Virginia Sea Grant, and VIMS. The project includes two
ocean observing system teacher workshops specifically focusing on the Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System, and two years of student water quality monitoring led by the teachers that attended the Year 1 workshop.

In Year 2, these original 12 teachers are bringing a "buddy teacher" from their school or district to the second workshop (this June 25th and 26th), when they will learn to coordinate classroom implementation of ocean observing system data, water quality monitoring data, and the water quality monitoring itself. The buddy teams will share monitoring gear, allowing twice as many students to experience field work and practice collecting water quality data. Both years' workshops include presentations by VIMS and NOAA ocean observing scientists, a videoconference with COSEE-NOW partner Rutgers University Coastal Ocean Observation Lab, and an OOS/water quality monitoring field experience aboard the 74-foot VIMS Research Vessel Pelican. For more information, contact Janice McDonnell.

COSEE-Southeast is holding their workshop Taking the Pulse of Our Coastal Ocean from July 7-12 at the Marine Science Research Institute in Jacksonville, Florida. This six-day residential workshop takes 20 middle and high school educators and helps them to develop new ways to use real-time data on the ocean in their classrooms. Teachers will also learn how scientists use technology to study the coastal ocean between North Carolina and Florida. Educators will receive access to new resources and take-home materials; all lessons align with national science education standards; and State Certification credit is available. Stipends will also be offered. The application deadline was May 9, 2008.

COSEE-West is joining with COSEE-Coastal Trends to present their OOS Summer Teacher Institute August 11-15. Twenty-five middle and high school teachers will spend five days learning about various remote sensing tools utilized by scientists in the course of their research. Participants will spend the first day at the University of Southern California going over some Ocean Literacy principles and familiarizing themselves with the SCCOOS (Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System) network. The second day participants will be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory learning about satellites, what they monitor in the world's oceans and what data are available for classroom use. The third day will be at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, where teachers will get to use a remotely operated vehicle to explore the sea floor. The fourth day will be at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, where Laura Murray from COSEE-Coastal Trends will help them to adapt some of her lesson plans to the West Coast. Participants will also get to explore this world famous teaching aquarium (and COSEE-West partner). The fifth and final day will be at the University of California, Los Angeles where participants will wrap up the week, network with their fellow teachers, and continue the development of their lesson plans. Applications will be accepted until the institute is full. For more information contact Jane Lee, Program Manager for COSEE-West at USC.
Network Announcements

COSEE at NMEA 2008 COSEE is one of the sponsors of the NMEA 2008 national conference in Savannah, Georgia, One World: One Water. COSEE Centers are sponsoring 11 educators from around the country to attend the conference: six from South East, two from Coastal Trends, one from Ocean Systems, one from Great Lakes, and one from New England. In addition, several COSEE-related presentatons will be offered, and the COSEE Council will be meeting. Stay tuned for a report in a future issue of CNN!
Interim National Leadership Team Update

Future COSEE Council Meetings The COSEE Council will meet at Skidaway Institute of Oceanography on Thursday July 24, 2008, during the NMEA conference. The Skidaway Institute of Oceanography is located on a 700-acre campus on Skidaway Island, 16 miles southeast of Savannah, Georgia. The Institute sits on the banks of the Skidaway River in a remote pristine location, with access to a diverse range of estuarine and coastal habitats. It was created in 1967 by a commission of the Georgia General Assembly and was given the mandate to conduct research in all fields of oceanography and marine sciences.

In the future, the Council will have two standing meetings each year during the first Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of November and May. We will continue to meet as needed at NMEA and other venues of opportunity.

The Fall 2008 Council meeting will be held on November 3-5 at the Smithsonian's new Ocean Hall. (Thank you, Paula Keener-Chavis!) The NAC meeting will be Wednesday, November 5, 2008, also at the Ocean Hall.

The Spring 2009 Council meeting will be held on May 4-6, 2009. Location to be determined.

Center Evaluators' Workshop, September 11-12, 2008 The evaluators will be meeting at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography to share COSEE Center evaluation strategies, discuss common evaluation instruments and metrics, review the new National Evaluator's cooperative agreement with NSF, and discuss what needs to be accomplished by Center evaluators for the NSF ten-year review of the COSEE program in 2012.
Work Group Updates

Web Working Group
The COSEE Web Working Web (WWG) has reviewed and iterated several sets of draft layouts for the main COSEE.net interface, its subpages, and associated navigation. The WWG has also been examining various types of data that should be included in the COSEE.net database architecture. The COSEE.net redesign discussions have provided the foundation for developing a different yet complementary set of tools to aid new Centers and those Centers that are planning to "revamp" sections of their existing Center websites. The WWG refers to these tools as "COSEE-in-a-box" and, beginning in mid-June, will begin determining requirements for this new web design tool. For more information on the WWG, please contact its Chair, Annette deCharon.

Messaging and Marketing Working Group
There is a new COSEE Council Working Group for Messaging and Marketing (MMWG). The chair of the working group is Sharon Walker. The MMWG has some exciting work ahead of them as they work with the Smithsonian Institution (SI) to develop ocean literacy messages and promote COSEE's work in the SI and elsewhere. Negotiations, led by Paula Keener-Chavis, are underway to have a COSEE ocean science educator in residence in the Smithsonian's Ocean Hall. This is a wonderful opportunity for the COSEE Network! If you are interested in joining the MMWG, please contact any of the current members for information: Sharon Walker, Lundie Spence, Paula Keener-Chavis, Sue Cook, and Laura Murray.
COSEE Network Calendar
June

COSEE-Coastal Trends: Orientation for Scientist-Educator Partnership Teams, UMCES Horn Point Laboratory, June 16-20.

COSEE-SouthEast: Ocean Sciences Education Leadership Institute, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, June 22-28.

COSEE-Central Gulf of Mexico: Teacher/Scientist Institute, contact Sharon Walker for more information. June 22-27.

COSEE-Pacific Partnerships: "Promoting Research Investigations in the Marine Environment (PRIME)" program for community college faculty and students; University of Oregon's Institute of Marine Biology, Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center, South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, Oregon Coast Aquarium; contact Coral Gehrke for more information. June 22-August 16.

COSEE-West: Introduction to Marine Science Seminar, Marina del Rey Middle School, June 23-27.

July

COSEE-Ocean Systems:
Understanding Seasonal Change in the Ocean Using Ocean Observing Data, co-sponsored by the University of New Hampshire and the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS), University of New Hampshire, July 7-11.

COSEE-Central Gulf of Mexico: Teacher/Scientist Institute online, July 7-21.

COSEE-Central Gulf of Mexico: FLEXE/GLOBE teacher workshop; JL Scott Marine Education Center, July 24-25. Contact Sheila Brown for more information.

COSEE-Coastal Trends and COSEE-Great Lakes
are collaborating on an observing  workshop: Realtime Aquatic Data Workshop, on Lake Erie, July 14-17.

COSEE-Ocean Systems:  Teaching Science by Ocean Inquiry at the University of Maine Darling Marine Center, July 21-25.

COSEE-California: Marine Activities, Resources & Education (MARE) Leadership Institute, UC Santa Cruz July 31-August 8


August
COSEE-Great Lakes: Lake Michigan Exploration Workshop, Chicago, August 2-8.

COSEE-Coastal Trends and COSEE-West:OOS Summer Teacher Institute, Los Angeles, August 11-15.







CNN Schedule

The deadline for submissions for the next issue of CNN is Friday, July 11. Please send comments, suggestions and news to the editor, Catherine Cramer.
COSEE Center Directory

Following is an alphabetical list of currently funded COSEE centers, with links to their websites and COSEE Council representatives.

COSEE California (Craig Strang, UC Berkeley)

COSEE Central Gulf of Mexico (Sharon Walker, Scott Marine Education Center and Aquarium)

COSEE Coastal Trends (Laura Murray, U of Maryland Center for Environmental Science)

COSEE Great Lakes (Rosanne Fortner, Ohio State University)

COSEE Networked Ocean World (Janice McDonnell, Rutgers University)

COSEE New England (Billy Spitzer, New England Aquarium)

COSEE Ocean Learning Communities (Veronique Robigou, University of Washington)

COSEE Ocean Systems (Annette deCharon, Darling Marine Center, University of Maine)

COSEE Pacific Partnerships (Jan Hodder, Oregon Institute of Marine Biology)

COSEE SouthEast (Lundie Spence, South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium)

COSEE West (Linda Duguay, University of Southern California)


Include Your News in CNN!
Send news and announcements
 
of interest to the COSEE Network  community to the editor, Catherine Cramer. This includes calls for presentations, workshop
announcements, etc.




































































































































































































































































































































Science Literacy Workshops

AAAS Announces Professional Development Opportunities for K-12 Science Educators

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is offering 
  Using the Atlas of Science Literacy workshops for teachers.

The Atlas of Science Literacy is co-published by AAAS and NSTA.

   



Thanks You Ocean Podcasts

The California-based
Thank You Ocean Campaign has begun a series of short (3-5 minutes) podcasts. You can listen to the podcasts, explore each topic further through the links on that page, and subscribe to receive an emailed notice each time a new podcast is posted.

Thank You Ocean Report podcasts

Stories feature interviews with ocean experts, explorers, scientists, conservationists, government and business leaders.








 
NSF STEM Scholarships
NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM)

This program makes grants to institutions of higher education to support scholarships for academically talented, financially needy students, enabling them to enter the workforce following completion of an associate, baccalaureate, or graduate level degree in science and engineering disciplines. Grantee institutions are responsible for selecting scholarship recipients, reporting demographic information about student scholars, and managing the S-STEM project at the institution.

More information
online.




 
Great Lakes at the Movies
If you know someone who is going to be in the Great Lakes region this summer,
tell them to look for the film Mysteries of the Great Lakes, produced in Canada by Science North.  COSEE-Great Lakes' Rosanne Fortner tells us that the film explores how the Great Lakes have changed over time, and follows their recent history through the life of a lake sturgeon. The film is showing at IMAX theaters in the region. The
accompanying website
has teaching materials for elementary and middle schools.