Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

DLESE 2003 MEETING:

Skills Workshop

Optional
August 2nd- 8:00 am - 5:30 pm

Skills Workshop Program
Skills Workshop Schedule
Abstracts & presenters

The DLESE Skills Workshops are designed to provide educators and researchers with opportunities to work directly with resources, collections, authoring tools and services that are effective for use in the development and facilitation of inquiry and discovery-based learning activities. Consistent with the Broadening DLESE theme of this year's meeting, these sessions will also foster a community building process as educators, researchers, developers, and service providers work together for common goals. During each workshop and throughout the Annual Meeting, participants are strongly encouraged to become actively engaged and to contribute their own creativity. The Skills Workshop sessions will offer first hand experience with a wide range of material, including the Atmospheric Visualization Collection, EarthKAM, community-based inquiry, techniques for integrating field and digital inquiry, geographic information systems, the building and evaluation of collections of resources, cataloguing systems for collections, working with metadata, the design of effective inquiry-based activities and, for newcomers as well as seasoned DLESE users, a guided tour through DLESE itself. Collectively, this diverse selection of resources includes material appropriate for Earth system education at all levels.

In the morning, a plenary session for all Skills Workshop participants will focus on the value of authentic activities in web-based teaching and learning . Subsequent to the plenary, Skills Workshop sessions will be scheduled for the remainder of the morning and throughout the afternoon.

Since several Skills Workshop events will be running in parallel at any given time on Saturday, it will not be possible for anyone to participate in all of the sessions. However, many of the same resources will be presented again on an informal basis, along with additional material, at the Share Fair, and will serve a continued role in the strand sessions that will take place on the following days.

Each of the Skills Workshops is a brief introduction to a resource that can help empower us to become more effective as educators. Recognizing that it is not possible to become thoroughly adept at using a new resource within the span of a few hours, facilitators will provide the participants with strategies for continuing to develop their new skills as they integrate them into their work as Earth system educators.