Natural Resources, School of

 

Date of this Version

September 2000

Comments

Published in Electronic Journal of Science Education Vol. 5 – No. 1 – September 2000. Copyright 2000. Used by permission.

Abstract

The Nebraska Earth Science Education Network (NESEN) is an organization within the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose objectives are to: 1) promote and enhance K-12 earth science education in Nebraska, 2) improve teacher knowledge and understanding so that students become better informed about the complexities of environmental and natural resources issues and 3) enhance the transfer of earth science information to the K-12 teaching community (Gosselin, Mohlman, Mesarch & Meyer, 1996; Gosselin et al., 1999). To achieve this last objective NESEN developed the Students and Teachers Exchanging Data, Information and Ideas (STEDII) program with the help of support from the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Energy’s National Institute for Global and Environmental Change (NIGEC). The initial focus of STEDII was to use the collection of weather data as a mechanism to promote the sharing of data and information between eight schools involved in an electronic communication project funded by NASA (Gosselin et al., 1999). The topic of weather was chosen because students experience weather everyday, weather is relevant to students' lives in an agricultural based state (Williams, 1992), weather is quite variable in Nebraska (NebraskaLand, 1996) and weather is part of most school systems' curriculum. The STEDII project has provided students and teachers with basic weather instrumentation, instruction on how to use these instruments, lessons on weather topics and a website by which schools can share data by submitting and retrieving measurements from a centralized data base.

COinS