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ABSTRACT
In order to effectively make Earth science data accessible, usable, and useful by the educational community it is clear that there needs to be a spectrum of services and resources that address the obstacles and support the efforts starting from the research scientist and ending with the student. We describe resources and services here that address a number of components of this spectrum. The Earth Exploration Toolbook (EET, http://serc.carleton.edu/eet) is an online resource that contains chapters, each of which provides step-by-step instructions to walk users through an example of using data and tools in a way that is relevant and interesting to the teachers and students. We developed a mechanism to support the development of new EET chapters, offering scientists an effective mechanism to provide their data, analysis tools, and scientific knowledge to the educational community. In addition, we piloted a professional development workshop series to facilitate the use of EET chapters by teachers.
We have found that providing scientists with a partnership and mechanisms that help them facilitate the use of their data, analysis tools, and scientific knowledge by the educational community is very effective, and that providing professional development for the use of EET chapters is very important for facilitating the use of scientific data and analysis tools in education..
INTRODUCTION
The value of involving students in an inquiry process to learn Earth science concepts has been stated widely (AAAS, 1993; Barstow and Geary, 2001; National Research Council, 1996). Furthermore, master teachers have observed that students learn scientific concepts more fully if they use data to explore concepts themselves (Manduca and Mogk, 2002). This observation has been embraced by the geoscience and educational communities and several groups, both technological and educational, are actively working to bring real scientific data into teaching and learning (DLESE, 2001; Manduca and Mogk, 2000; Wright and Sumner, 2003).
On the technological side, recent advances have provided access to distributed scientific data sets as well as the tools to examine and analyze them. There are a number of efforts currently underway (e.g. THREDDS project (Domenico, 2004a; 2004b; Domenico, et al., 2002) ana the interoperability efforts by the ESIP Federation (ESIP Federation, 2002)) to develop these tools in such a way as to facilitate them being used...