2008 Joint Annual Meeting (5-9 Oct. 2008): AMS K-12 Teacher Enhancement Program

The American Meteorological Society has joined forces with NOAA through the Cooperative Program for Earth System Education (CPESE), NASA, the U.S. Navy, and NSF to enhance public understanding of the fluid Earth system and to promote greater human resource diversity in the atmospheric, oceanic and hydrologic sciences. Key components in this process are the AMS' K-12 teacher enhancement summer workshops (Project Atmosphere, The Maury Project) and courses on the fundamentals of weather (DataStreme Atmosphere), oceanography (DataStreme Ocean), and the global water cycle (DataStreme Water in the Earth System). These courses, offered each fall and spring semester over the past 12.5, 5, and 7.5 years, respectively, have trained nearly 14,000 teachers in the use of current online environmental data to bring excitement and motivation to their classrooms and to be resource teachers for their colleagues. Courses model scientific inquiry and foster development of critical thinking skills. The DataStreme experience is delivered to small groups of teachers at locations nationwide in a partnership of AMS, NOAA and SUNY Brockport via several meetings, weekly mentoring and twice weekly online Internet delivery of course study materials. Special efforts are made to recruit teachers who are themselves members, or teach in schools that serve underrepresented student populations.