Welcome!HOU (and Friends) 2009

WorkshopYerkes Observatory

Carl Pennypacker

Thanks to:

Vivian Hoette

Jim Gee

Peggy Storrs

Staff of Yerkes

HOU Collaborators around the World

Review of Where We Are and Where We are going (please contribute as we go through this!):

(prepare for changes in education??)

• Review of (changing) Goals of HOU and this Workshop

• HOU-Affiliated Teacher Workshops

• Progress on Infrastructure Components of HOU

• Building and Marketing HOU

• Note on IYA and Global HOU

• Challenges

Some of HOU’s General Goals:• Support Teachers’ Use of amazingly rich, inquiry- and great-pedagogy-based astronomy data, software, and curricula, hands-on manipulatives, optics, web cams, etc.

• Inspire and educate the next generation of scientists with fantastic materials

• Help provide some of the tools/units so this can happen -- software, telescopes, computer game technology

• Be a place for leading astronomy education and leading astronomy educators

• Support and spread use of modern technology in classrooms• Reach populations that normally would never travel to Alpha Centuri, let alone z = 1 supernovae!

• Help reform science teaching in general,, support “Modeling Physics/How People Learn”-- like teaching and learning

• Keep good teachers in the profession and help them stay energized, excited, and supported as much as we can!

Some of HOU’s General Goals (cont):

• Generally support and respect teachers!

• Help spread and organize campaigns -- IASC, WISE, PANSTARRS (?), etc.

• Thrive in confusing political times:

President Obama loves and supports science and hopefully science education, but has budget problems, problems with Congress, NSF has decided to not traditionally support teacher enhancement, Secretary of Education Duncan has his own bizarre ideas (e.g., fire teachers whose students don’t do better on standardized mutliple choice tests,…)

• Find out how to thrive and support each other anyway.

Some Goals for the Conference:• WISE Workshops and Plans

• Learn what all of us are doing -- including those new to HOU, and see how we can work better together.

• Bring some level of communication and possible coordination amongst the programs represented here (WISE, Kepler, Galileoscope, Universe Quest, YAAYS, SOFIA, MAST, IASC, SDSS Outreach, Dark Skies Awareness, ….)

• Share curriculum, units, software, data bases, telescopes, web cams, Vernier tools, etc.

• Talk about UQ!

Some Goals for the Conference(continued):

• Share new ideas on units and pedagogy.

• Help coordinate and organize ideas for possible grants

• Build some possible excitement for the Universe Quest project test scale up. Need a few experienced HOU’ers to run after school programs

• Get Conferees exercising some of the telescopes on our network, especially this fall.

Some Workshops that Have Significant HOU Content/ideas:

• MAST -- Mississippi Academy for Science Teaching --

Viv, Rich, Steve and Jen just came from helping educate ~80 middle and high school teachers from Mississippi

• Texas Teachers: ~40 teachers from all over Texas, including those coming to Berkeley due to Patrick

• Jen and Steve’s workshop this summer in San Jose (~15 teachers, etc..)

• China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, GTTP trainings all around the world.

• YAAYS -- ~40 Teachers

Summary: We are helping to train approximately 200 US teachers a year. Not bad.

Infrastructure Progress:

• Image Processing Software: Salsa J and Visual Basic Versions now working not too badly. Salsa J Mac version greatly improved and can keep improving through Joe Bunick (new programmer for UQ).

• Telescope network is working with Perth -- not quite as stable as we want, but will get better and add more telescopes (Mehri Fadavi Observatory!).

• UQ Game may be a good teaching tool.

• Sloan SkyServer is in good shape for some HOU use by me (see my draft Hubble unit coming up)

• IASC is working very well

• Curriculum units getting better and better (Jupiter’s Moons, Light/Moon Phases Unit, etc.)

Building and Marketing HOU:

• GSS and HOU Curriculum and Software and publishing progress

• More Mississippi workshops and grants

• ITEST (NSF program) grants - build existing UQ grant through HOU Teacher network (supplement)

• Global HOU workshops via Internet Video can be arranged and carried out.

• Race to the Top Funds (HOU Teacher Phil Dauber and his “Schools for Tomorrow” plans

• HOU at George Smoots’ Teacher Academy in Berkeley.

• Become part of PanSTARRS and LSST outreach.

International Year of Astronomy (IYA) and Galileo Teacher Training Program:

• Kickoff meeting at UNESCO HQ in the end of January

• Galileo Teacher Training Program, which is largely based on Global HOU (GHOU) is an official cornerstone project of IYA -- proposals in process to test new, non-multiple choice, machine based assessments with HOU.

• Plans to train teachers in several dozen nations on GHOU. Already have had workshops in India (Rich Lohman led) and China

• Keep doing video workshops, and endeavor to build support systems in each nation locally.

International Year of Astronomy (IYA) and Galileo Teacher Training Program:

• Kickoff meeting at UNESCO HQ in the end of January

• Galileo Teacher Training Program, which is largely based on Global HOU (GHOU) is an official cornerstone project of IYA -- proposals in process to test new, non-multiple choice, machine based assessments with HOU.

• Plans to train teachers in several dozen nations on GHOU. Already have had workshops in India (Rich Lohman led) and China

• Keep doing video workshops, and endeavor to build support systems in each nation locally.

International Year of Astronomy (IYA) and Galileo Teacher Training Program:

Challenges:

• How to share and communicate meaningfully

• How to make sure infrastructure continues to grow and is working correctly.

• Paying for workshops and training new teachers -- aim for 500 teachers a year in 5 years, 1000 teachers a year in 10 years.

• Leadership at NSF and Department of Education is not optimal.

• How to coordinate and regularize and spread and implement all of the things we are producing! We need to talk here!

Up Beat and Great Things:

• We can still attract good teachers, even though we don’t have stipends, etc. (Hope we can pay stipends and travel at some point)

• A lot of success stories - IASC, YAAYS, MAST, UQ, etc.

• More and more things are working and getting better

• We have Yerkes and Viv still doing great things

• We have other groups that want to work with us

• We are all here to share and learn from each other.

• We enjoy and learn from each other!