Back to School 2020: Online Learning Resources

As we all face the challenges of COVID-19, making connections between communities and sharing resources with colleagues has become increasingly important. We would like to reassure you that STELAR is here for our community. In the meantime, we and pleased to share the below resources provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), our colleagues at Education Development Center (EDC), the Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE), the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) and the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL).

This synthesis paper highlights projects funded by the National Science Foundation’s Innovating Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) grant program that are either primarily designed to support teacher learning or that incorporate teacher learning in a significant way.

The Internet is imagined as an all-inclusive technology that will allow everyone, regardless of social status, gender, or ability, to communicate equally. The full title of a recent book is The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know. But has the offline world really changed? Or is what is happening online merely a reflection of real-world power structures and communications?

Technology has many conveniences, however the breakneck pace of it’s development has created a uniquely difficult problem for today’s teachers. Coding is unquestioningly an important skill for modern students, and will only become more important in the future, but many teachers (including the author of this curriculum) received little to no formal education in coding.

While programming may be daunting at first, we implore you to always remember the first and most important rule of coding, concisely summarized here by Science Fiction author Douglas Adams:

“Don’t Panic.”

New technologies are increasingly giving science teachers the ability to access and customize science lessons. However, there is substantial debate in the literature about whether and under what conditions teacher customization benefit student learning. In this study, we examined teacher customization of inquiry-based science lessons from an online lesson portal. We found that students who completed teacher-customized lessons had greater improvements in science content understanding than students who completed non-customized lessons.

Developing Project Based Instructional Units Utilizing ArcGIS Online is an open, asynchronous, self-paced 40 hour, 5 module training course that utilizes ArcGIS Online for secondary educators (thoguh post-secondary educators may benefit from the course as well).  This course is designed for educators who are familiar with and who have taught with ArcGIS, particularly non-GIS educators who would like to add a geospatial perspective, project based instructional techniques, and the "power of data" to their existing courses.

ComputerScienceOnline.org provides students and lifelong learners with educational, career and developmental information related to the world of computer science.

The Virtual Hall of Science has the potential to extend those lessons well beyond the New York Hall of Science’s brick-and-mortar walls and reach students all over the world.  Built by NYC middle and high schoolers over the course of two years, this ITEST project not only provides interactive installations to the general public, but also cultivated the teamwork, illustration, and programming skills of its builders.

Through these role model videos, professionals' real world views and application of math show high school students just how relevant math is to their futures.  Filmed on location, professionals tell students about how they use math in their careers and what math meant to them in high school.  

Network science is a significant pathway into understanding many kinds of Big Data. Since its inceptions during the late 20th century it has been increasing its relevance to people's everyday life. Networks can help us to make sense of this increasingly complex world, making it a useful literacy for people living in the 21st century.

In this chapter, I discuss the development, piloting and revision of a new instrument for measuring pre/post the academic self-efficacy of students. The initial motivation for the creation of this new instrument came from an unsuccessful search for an instrument to measure self-efficacy in an NSF-funded project designed to investigate the motivational effects of a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) on the science achievement of middle-school students.

The Library contains uniquely interactive, web-based virtual manipulatives or concept tutorials, mostly in the form of Java applets, for mathematics instruction (K-8 emphasis). The ultimate goal of the library is to create a national resource from which teachers may freely draw to enrich their mathematics classrooms. The materials is also intended to be of importance for the mathematical training of both in-service and pre-service elementary teachers.

NetSci High, also known as ITEST project Network Science for the Next Generation, shares its resources used as part of the project on its webpage.  Resources include a "Rookie's Guide to Network Science," a number of interactive online visualizations, articles and publications, and NetLogo and Network Interactives downloads.