Brighter Than Sunshine

This week I'm hoping to start introducing my students to the NASA S'COOL project.  I was looking back at what we submitted last year, and we apparently only submitted two data sets.  I'm pretty certain that we collected more than that last year, but I'm thinking that we maybe didn't collect during overpass times.  I am optimistic that we will be able to do more observations this year and perhaps even do something with them.  At the very least, some of my more advanced students could certainly work more independently on some investigations while the other students work on other concepts.

If you are interested in having your students be involved with citizen science, I think that this is a good project to get involved with.  The lead scientist on this has connections with GLOBE as well, and I've contacted her several times with questions or issues and either she has responded or someone else has in a very prompt manner.

The website for the project is here: http://scool.larc.nasa.gov/ .  To help students with cloud identification, I had them use this guide as we practice identifying clouds:  http://wvscience.org/clouds/Cloud_Key.pdf .  We also worked through several tutorials from the NASA S'COOL project to help us with the different areas that we would need to report.

I also recommend checking out this site for many Earth Science activities including weather.  The STORM Project through UNI has quite a few great activities to use during your weather units as well.

I am always looking to make improvements in my lessons for students.  If you have any ideas you would like to share or if you have questions, let me know!