You are a high-school science teacher. Your students spend a lot of time online, and you wish you had easier ways to merge teaching science with the World Wide Web. Luckily, the Satellite Observations in Science Education project (SOSE), provides free tools known as Reusable Content Objects, or RCOs. You can easily and quickly use RCOs to put an interactive web page together and get your lesson taught. The emphasis at the SOSE website is on satellite data, but its tools are multi-disciplinary and can be used in a wide variety of science contexts.
The key is developing interactive activities. Reading words on a web page can only be just so fun. Students stay engaged if they can interact and experiment. The best way to determine if SOSE is a resource that might be useful to you as an educator is to jump in. So let's come up with a scenario, and create a module.
What happens if a massive iceberg breaks off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica? You discuss this event in class, and have a nice satellite image of the iceberg from a news web site. But you would like to find a way to convey to the class just how big this iceberg really is.
Is there a tool available we can put to use in this situation? Browse the directory of available tools. The description for the Feature Sizer tool says "allows a user to estimate the area of a feature within an image." That's just what we need! As instructed, you download the tool.
The web site says we have to configure the tool with an XML file. This sounds complex and not very fun. For one thing, you may not even know what XML means. But you see a link to generate your XML automatically. That sounds promising, so you click the link. A window pops up that asks you the name of your image file, the resolution, and the units of measure. This is the information you have to provide to make the Feature Sizer tool work with your data, that is, your image of the iceberg. With some minimal research, you are able to determine the image resolution is 1.0 km per pixel. Follow the instructions and generate and save your XML configuration file.
Finally, you need to make a web page where your students will access your new, interactive lesson. The SOSE web site provides a minimal template for a web page, with the HTML needed to display the Feature Sizer tool. Beyond that, you can have your school's web designer (or a student!) pretty up the page as much as you like. Your web page is now done. You ask the web administrator to make it available on the school web site, www.yourschool.com, under your directory, science_grade_9. Following the instructions from the SOSE site, in this directory you have:
Point your class to the new URL (in this example, http://www.yourschool.com/science_grade_9/iceberg.html), and you are in business. The actual, interactive tool which would appear in your web page follows in Figure 1 below.
The fact that the kids have to actually trace the outline of the iceberg with their mouse makes them feel involved. It feels good watching your students learn from a real-world example. They know the area of this iceberg, but still don't have a good feel for relative size. Your school is in Connecticut. You get the brilliant idea to create a second web page, using a nice satellite image of New England that you found on the web (complete with a recent snowstorm). Following the same procedure, you quickly assemble the interactive web page shown in Figure 2 below, and your students now know this iceberg is almost as big as their home state!
If you would like to learn more about the SOSE project and the RCO toolkit, stop by the web site. There are many pre-built learning activities you can browse that will give you an idea of what is possible. Some of the RCOs can even bring in real-time satellite data, which may prove very useful for giving your students a view of what is happening in their world "right now".
This project was made possible by funding from NASA and is part of the NASA Earth Science /Research, Education and Applications Solutions Network/ (Earth Science /REASoN/).