This week we have a guest blogger, Mr. Steven Frantz from Roswell-Kent Middle School in Akron, Ohio. Mr. Frantz is a GLOBE teacher and is also a participant in GLOBE From Learning To Research Project. As a part of the project, he had the opportunity to attend the 2013 National Science Teacher Association Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. He presents his perspective on the meeting as a first time attendee.
Wow! NSTA. I have never been to NSTA until invited by the GLOBE Program to present at their booth. I was told over 8,000 science teachers were registered to attend this three day event. It seems I must have spoken to each and every one of them! At least that’s what my feet tell me. Walking into the vendor hall is, in itself, an experience. National Geographic, NOAA, NSF, and Sea World were there. All the biggies in the science education world were there. Then there were the ones I never heard of before: Zooniverse, Standard Deviants Accelerate, WorldStrides and so many others. Then there was the GLOBE Program booth. Two stories tall, blue with many larger-than-life pictures. Definitely an “AH-HA” moment!
An image of the GLOBE booth at the 2013 NSTA meeting
We all joked a bit as we strapped on the “Justin Bieber” headset as we began our presentation. It was hard for me to keep it down to 20 minutes. There have been so many great stories to tell! The audience ranged from people who had never heard of the GLOBE Program before to our venerable original Gary.
I also found the time to attend one of the workshops to beta test the new eTraining. This was really exciting and hopefully will open up the doors for many teachers to be able to bring the GLOBE Program to their students. Since the training was on the cloud protocol, we even went outside to identify clouds and calculate the percent of cloud cover. Unfortunately there weren’t many clouds in the sky. I did not hear any complaints about the bright sunny sky, however!
Believe it or not, we even found time to relax a bit one evening and have dinner together and share even more stories. That is one of the really neat things about being part of the GLOBE community. Even though separated by miles and time, whenever GLOBE folks meet, there are always the wonderful stories to be shared.
My many thanks go out to everyone who made this once-in-a-lifetime experience possible.
Suggested activity: Did you attend the NSTA meeting, or have you attended one in the past? What was your experience? We’d love to hear about it. Leave us a comment, send us an email or post on our Facebook page. And be sure to watch our videos of GLOBE at NSTA as well as a presentation by GLOBE Partner Dave Bydlowski.
From the desk of teacher a student or colleague make a strong himself and collect a knowledge of many things.