I've been working on the idea of engaging my students in authentic scientific research. Well that's pretty hard given that I'm a teacher not a scientist. But through the power of the Citizen Science website, I'm finding pretty neat possibilities. Here's the project that I tested out today...and it is easy to see how I could do something like this with my 6th graders.
Dr. Kathleen Gorski (from University of Massachusetts in Springfield, MA) asked for citizens to help her collect more data points in measuring the solar energy that bounces back from the earth and into space....or earth's albedo.
Very easy to do ....just walk outside today (June 21st) anytime from 5pm to 8pm and snap a picture of a white piece of paper. Email the photo off to Dr. Gorski's group and they'll take over.
This group will compare the proportion of energy that is bouncing off the paper to the proportion that is coming off the surrounding ground. All of this helps to accumulate data on monitoring how the climate/weather is changing.
Such a super easy way for students to become involved....I think the only hard part is waiting for Dr. Gorski's group to process the data and make it public.
What was very cool about this project was that my photoblogging colleagues offered to jump in and participate. We have banded together and taken the Summer Photoblogging Challenge which is to find something worthy of a photograph every day all summer. There are 34 teachers who are working together to post those pictures on our Group site within Flickr and share them with each other. It helps us learn how to post pictures, how to use Twitter as well as take pictures. The power of Twitter connected the Tweets I was making about this project to the teachers in the JJAProject. All of sudden, there were more people interested in participating and helping out. Should help the scientists collect more data and more data will make for better conclusions. The power of all this collaboration just gets bigger and bigger.