# Presentation: 475198

## Using Maps and Graphs in the Classroom

- By Peggy Foletta GLOBE teacher and GLOBE Master trainer
- and Jeff Cieslak GLOBE Visualization team

- The goal of this presentation is to familiarize you with a few of the tools available in the GLOBE visualizations and to suggest how they might be brought into the classroom.

## The National Science Content Standards emphasize student-generated inquiry.

## National Science Education Standards http://stills.nap.edu/readingroom/books/nses/html/

- Inquiry is central to science learning.
- One of the eight categories of science content standards is **Science as inquiry. **
- Inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences is the central strategy for teaching science. Teachers focus inquiry predominantly on real phenomena.... where students are given investigations or guided toward fashioning investigations that are demanding but within their capabilities.

## National Science Education Standards

- Teachers can take an inquiry approach as they guide students in acquiring and interpreting information from sources that include computer databases.
**GOOD SCIENCE PROGRAMS REQUIRE ACCESS TO THE WORLD BEYOND THE CLASSROOM. **District and school leaders must allocate financial support to provide opportunities for students to investigate the world outside the classroom. Communication technology has made it possible for anyone to readily access data. This communication technology should be easily accessible to students.

## Using the GLOBE student data and visualizations as a source for student inquiry: 

- Provides a vast amount of data from which scientific inquiry can be generated.
- Allows students to investigate and communicate with the world beyond the classroom.
- Allows inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences (if students have collected some of the data themselves).
- Provides a framework for searching and displaying data for analysis.
- The GLOBE website provides a place to communicate student findings and communicate with scientists and other student scientists.

## Using the Earth as a System Poster

- An excellent way to introduce students to GLOBE maps and inquiry.
- The first activity teaches the students to understand how to read a visualization, what the color bar represents, etc.
- The next activity has the students analyze one variable through time, looking for trends.
- The other activities have students compare different variables through time looking for relationships and trends.

## To introduce students to scientific inquiry, the visualizations can be used as a beginning of class activity with teacher guidance using one computer and video projector.

- For the first few minutes of class, the teacher might guide the students to come up with questions about the local conditions, such as, “it seems to be getting hotter earlier this year.  Is this just our imagination?  How can we find out for sure?”
- The teacher models how to use the visualizations by bringing up graphs and maps of the school’s (or a nearby school’s) data to investigate.
- The teacher does this type of guidance of simple hypotheses to familiarize the students with hypothesis testing and the visualization tools.

- A good place to start a more complete investigation as a model for the students is to use the GLOBE visualizations to explore their local data.

## Steps to Doing GLOBE Student Inquiry:

- Observe and explore existing data and make new observations.
- Ask questions and develop a hypothesis.
- Assemble and organize data.
- Analyze data.
- Conclude using logic to reason your way to conclusions.
- Communicate your results.

## Observe and explore existing data and make new observations.

- Click on “Schools” in the navigation bar.
- Type in your school name in the search box and press “Start Search”.
- Click on [Graph] for your school.
- Use the graphs to view various data sets and observe trends. (Monthly mean temp & precip)

## Observe and explore existing data and make new observations.

- Zoom out to compare our school to others on local, regional, national, and global scales.
-  Use the “show table” option to locate a school with a similar monthly mean temperature and with a sufficient amount of data in an interesting place.

## Ask questions and develop a hypothesis.

- Was this school’s temperature the same as ours during other months?
-   Since the temperatures of both schools were the same during this one month, we suspect they may be similar in other months.
-   At this point students may come up with a variety of hypotheses.  For this presentation we will explore this hypothesis:  **“The monthly average temperatures for these two schools in 1998 were within 3 degrees C during the entire year.”      **

## Assemble and organize data.

- Make a graph of the monthly mean temperature for 1998 for these two schools.
- Use the “show table” option to display the data.

## Analyze data.

- Find the differences between the 12 monthly mean temperatures for the two schools.

## Mean Temperature Differences

-   Do we accept or reject the hypothesis?

## Conclude using logic to reason your way to conclusions.

## Communicate your results.

- Discuss the similarities and differences in the data and possible reasons for the results.  Write a lab report in the GLOBE journal and share with the other school via GLOBEMail.
- Discuss future directions for research.  For example, we could look at humidity or monthly total precipitation similarities and differences to investigate reasons for the differences in average monthly temperature between our two schools.

## Using Climatographs to compare different areas of the world

- Many students have not traveled extensively and many of them believe that the climate conditions in their home area represents the climate conditions all over the world.  A case in point:  I ask my students what would naturally grow in a vacant field in our town.  The answer is, weeds.  The common misconception is that weeds would grow in vacant lots everywhere in the world.  Another misconception is that sprinkler systems to keep the lawn green is a common practice worldwide.  Also, to my students, foggy day school schedules are the norm for winter, and it doesn’t rain in summer.

- Using the GLOBE visualizations to compare climates in different locations is a good starting point to bring an understanding to students of biome differences around the world.  The visualizations have the option of making a climatograph (mean monthly temperature and total monthly precipitation are graphed together) from a school’s data.  Studying these with a follow-up of personal contact with each GLOBE school compared via GLOBEMail could bring a whole new level of understanding of cultural and climatic differences.

## Climatographs

- GLOBE homepage _[http://www.globe.gov](http://www.globe.gov/)_
- Click on “Visualizations”.
- Click on “GLOBE sites”.
- Click on “Atmospheric Site Summary”.
- Search for the two schools.
- Enter “Kingsburg or Nara” into the search box and change the option to “find in school name”.

## Climatographs

- Select both schools from the table.
- Press go to the Atmospheric Site Summary.
- Click on the site name to view the climatograph.