Adapting to a Changing GLOBE - Is the Theme of the Annual GLOBE Meeting starting this Monday, July 12th, 2021

Meeting About Earth Science from new points of view:

Teachers, Scientists, & Students are gathering round the Earth to share latest research, new tools and local place-based geosphere understandings gathered while working with the website, linking schools and their students measuring the local climate, weather, soil, local disasters, or management.  Students are posting new ideas after looking at real time or durational problems and building their ideas into science poster propositions based on collecting data into solutions for human resiliency.  You can see International Virtual Science Symposia students on the linked video link above. They are remarkable.

Citizen Science and STEM:

Reporting on measurements and STEM based discoveries using NASA assets and GLOBE resources,these  are just a part of the rigorous and relevant work with formal science that researchers who created new teaching standards from Stanford and from Harvard (NGSS) support that allow Elementary to Community College students to learn how to talk, think, propose, measure, analyze, compute,code, collaborate and evaluate as a new digital and media learning medium that develops young minds.  This kind of STEM practice prepares them for the future and links real time phenomenon from weather anomalities this week to state wide or regional drought, or floods, plants. fish or wildlife factors that will change how we build urban spaces or calculate snow pack water needs or impact food production, replanting after fires, air quality changing bird migrations.

Why Trees- it is all connected and tools exist to help us understand the world changing around us:

This week, it is my chance to learn from the inside about citizen science and about curriculum that can excite a student or excite an economist.

As a GLOBE poster presenter, it may take more than one expert click psa to explain the Trees Across the GLOBE campaign or how GLOBE may soon bring ecoliteracy research in schoolyard, a park or on GOOGLE Maps and GIS to your home or childcare center or school.   A team of a several universities, GLOBE Campaign initiatives, and two working nontraditional farms in Ohio and in Fermanagh came together from the The Nature of Cities conference and the outcome will be my first international collaboration poster on taking school students out virtually beyond walls during Covid which will be presented by the cohort next week. In the meantime, we will tell you about the process in case you want to upload the Earth Observer app on your phone.

Here is an example of finding the GLOBE Elementary School Portal in several languages and what it is about:

Step One:  Find out about GLOBE (language button on the upper left)

Elementary GLOBE - Elementary GLOBE - GLOBE.gov

Step Two:  Here is the Program Mission and History:

G.L.O.B.E. is an acronym (naming letters that abbreviate the program that it describes:

Founded on Earth Day 1994, the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program has been providing students and the public worldwide with the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to our understanding of the Earth system and global environment. As an international science and education program, GLOBE is dedicated to supplying the STEM professionals of tomorrow with the scientific knowledge necessary to tackle Earth's biggest mysteries. 

The Shared GLOBE Vision 

"A worldwide community of students, teachers, scientists, and citizens working together to better understand, sustain, and improve Earth's environment at local, regional, and global scales."

The Shared GLOBE Mission 

"To promote the teaching and learning of science, enhance environmental literacy and stewardship, and promote scientific discovery."

Step Three:  Quote from Margaret Mead- Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

There are many students who have not yet discovered the amazing world of thinking, dreaming, designing, and exploring that covers just a bit of the tools and possibilities you will see in the IVSS or Vlogger youtubes.  Students are learning over time to develop a new kind of EARTH literacy about systems, about seasons, and about the world around them.  That is how our poster came up as possible, that the farms and New Education Options would explore if there was something new to share about our projects that might stir hearts and move minds.

Step Four:  We are seeing A Framework for Science K-12 Science Education http://www.nap.edu/cart/download.cgi?record_id=13165) 

and reports like the California Air Resources Board Users Guide for the California Dept of Forestry and Fire Protection Urban and Community Forestry Program that refers to a data about net greenhouse gas and i-tree.  

Cooling down our planet will be the net result of many trillions of actions.  I never expected that my STEM and STEAM exploration would lead me to proposing that protecting birds, trees, water, habitat and sanctuary natural irreplaceable assets would protect our food, shelter, and communities.  But my adventure this week with presenting a New Chapter in Education or at my home, childcare center or as an eco tourist volunteer someday at CommonGround NI.org in Five Mile Town or in Oak Harbor, in Ottawa County, Ohio is sourced in my research reaching students and the personal response to my home heating up, extreme weather that is changing where we live and how we will respond.  We can learn alot from Trees Across the GLOBE and the Urban Heat Island Effect and its impact on Birds from student IVSS posters and students will speak for  trees that can shade us or get sick, and so much more.

From earthquakes to heat waves, to coastlines, to trails, from heavy metals to HABS and mosquitoes and swamps, GLOBE has a way of bringing all the math, science, design, storytelling, and engineering one missed in school and through hand held electronics bringing your volunteering at the Sepulveda Wildlife Basin or along the LA River Cleanup or the Coast to Life!  As a teacher, an aunt, a researcher and an artist, I am hooked on this educational innovation that is all the more accessible given the Digital Gap solutions that LAUSD and other Districts have put in place to keep kids safe.

Now our poster will come and go, but the opportunity to be a lifelong learner, to report and keep your neighborhood, trees, birds, lungs, aesthetics, crops and monarch butterflies, hummingbirds, coast, river and bees safer is part of an emmerging fabric that I need to keep up with to keep California Beautiful and make a contribution.

This is one of three psas to support the journalists who might want to gather these tools for stories or for working on homework or recreationally with your kids.  This is for you, us, and Nature.  I hope you will like our GLOBE outdoor classrooms and our research.

Start with these links and I will start part two of three tomorrow.

This summer you can walk the Lewis and Clark Trail and report tree heights and circumferences if you want or send me a picture of a champion tree on vacation to leboc@coyote.csusb.edu

CARB tools for decision making:

http://itreetools.org/streets/resources/Streets Species Codes.xls

http://arb.ca.gov/cci-resources