DISCOVER OUR EARTH 2.0: A STANDARDS-BASED DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

The Discover Our Earth program is designed to provide proven solutions to K-12 educational system by developing a variety of Geoinformatics resources that include interactive, inquiry-based resources/tools to help students learn and understand fundamental Earth science topics while interacting with real scientific data sets. Given the effectiveness of inquiry-based pedagogy and the potential of information technology resources to support and extend that approach, the Discover Our Earth Educational program is envisioning a leadership role in standards-based science education. The underlying philosophy is that since teachers are obligated to follow their state science content standards in their classroom activities, resources must be built to address the needs of teachers, not of the researchers. Traditionally, digital teaching and learning resources are being developed by scientific communities without paying specific attention to teachers' needs in the classrooms and the science content standards that they must follow. This traditional approach has produced valuable resources, but has been shown to be ineffective in classroom teaching as teachers struggle with science content provided and the standards that they must follow. In these efforts we plan to team up with classroom teachers, technology experts, education researchers, and program evaluators and jointly develop, test, and disseminate standards-based, “classroom proof”, Earth science teaching/learning resources. By developing resources using the State of California science content standards and having state representatives from the State of New York we aim to maximize the usage of our resources by other states, ultimately by all the states across the nation.