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Education -
General
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Written by Steven Richards and Mark Chandler
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Tuesday, 11 April 2006 |
EdGCM Professional Development Workshops
Enhancing Climate Science Teaching in the Classroom
 During the past two years, there have been numerous EdGCM training workshops for the higher-education and pre-college education communities. The central purpose of these workshops is to facilitate the appropriate use of EdGCM-based climate research activities in a variety of educational courses and settings. We do not have a targeted budget for conducting open workshops (as yet), but we have tried to respond to requests for training by traveling to various sites around the country to support interested educators.
At the K-12 level, EdGCM workshops have concentrated on staff development and provided educators with rigorous training in climate-science content, scientific inquiry and process skills, and the operation of all components of the EdGCM software suite. The goal is to help teachers acquire the necessary expertise to conduct authentic climate modeling research experiments (such as global warming) on desktop computers in their own classrooms or in school computer labs.
In higher education settings we have typically covered similar topics, but often we have also provided direct training to students (as well as professors) who will subsequently be using EdGCM for their own climate research projects. In some cases, we can tailor the workshops to the needs of a particular audience; for example, conducting paleoclimate experiments for geology students, or discussing analysis of specific atmospheric variables for meteorology majors. 
Regardless of the educational level, topics that are usually presented include, but are not limited to The Scientific Process: A Climate Scientist's Perspective; Intro to Global Climate Models (GCMs); EdGCM Basics; EdGCM Exercises: Global Warming Example; Creating Scientific Reports; Publishing Scientific Findings to the Web; EdGCM Administrator Features; and The EdGCM Website: Support and the On-line Community.
All of the training activities outlined above have been designed to align to the Science Teaching Standards and Science Content Standards of the National Science Education Standards (NSES). A comprehensive list of correlations of these standards to the EdGCM project is available on the EdGCM web site. After attending an EdGCM workshop, educators are fully equipped to provide their students with genuine climate-science, inquiry-based research activities.
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