Conferences

GLOBE NY Metro has hosted many information meetings at Queens College to introduce GLOBE to teachers and our directors have met at District and NYC Department of Education central offices and at Nassau and Suffolk County BOCES headquarters to provide program background for administrators. The rapid growth of the GLOBE Program in the New York City metropolitan area is largely due to these meetings—all participants quickly recognize the value of the program, the enormous resources that it puts in teachers’ hands, and the ways in which it empowers students.As of June 2006, no additional information meetings are scheduled.

On January 9, 2003, the Queens College GLOBE NY Metro program and New York City Department of Education’s Division of Instructional Support co-hosted a one-day Science Institute for representatives of all New York City Community and High School districts. The general purpose was to introduce GLOBE citywide; a more specific goal was to explore how GLOBE protocols and the website could be used by Middle School and Junior High School teachers as a vehicle for completing the exit research project mandated for all 8th Grade Earth Science students.

This was conceived as the first of several annual Science Institutes focused on how GLOBE can help teachers throughout the City with specific content areas. Applications to other Regents science classes, Science Research classes, and AP Environmental Science classes are obvious topics for future Institutes.

GLOBE student data are used by government and university scientists studying global change but can equally well be used by the students who collect the information to answer questions about the local environment. GLOBE NY Metro sponsors annual Student Research Conferences at which GLOBE schools can show what they have learned.

• The first GLOBE NY Metro Student Research Conference will occur at Queens College
• The topic for the conference is: “Microclimates in the New York City Metropolitan Area” and will be based on student atmosphere and soil temperature/moisture data.
• Students are encouraged to use not only their own data, but also information reported by other GLOBE schools in the region.
• All GLOBE schools in the metropolitan area are invited to participate.
• Each participating school will prepare a poster presentation describing its hypothesis, data collection, and conclusions.
• Student Research Conferences are non-competitive. The goal is that children learn from one another and see how scientists can approach the same topic in many different ways.
• Presentations will be grouped by grade level; in this way, children can learn from their peers and can also see what more advanced students are doing (and therefore what they will be able to do in the future.

Teachers commonly encounter bureaucratic, budgetary, and logistic obstacles when starting to implement GLOBE protocols in their classes. Ways to get past these obstacles are best explained by those who have faced them and found innovative solutions that have worked. GLOBE NY Metro holds annual pedagogy conferences so that teachers can address common issues, share creative solutions to problems, and learn about new ways that their colleagues have devised to improve GLOBE activities.