Continuing the Connections

Continuing the Connections: Sustaining the ESIP Education Community
Rebecca Reid and Margaret Mooney
Continuing the connections

Teachers who have attended ESIP conferences (Santa Barbara and Knoxville) have expressed interest in two main things: 1. Creating lesson plans that put to use the awesome tools, images, and data that encountered at ESIP Federation conference. 2. Maintaining connections formed with other educators, to continue the conversations, brainstorms and new lesson ideas.

To remain connected, create lessons, and continue the conversation, we propose the following:

• Create a website where we can share lesson ideas, and expand on the conversations started at the ESIP conferences.
• Provide stipends to teachers who agree to create lesson plans based on the information, data sources and tools
• Provide additional stipends to teachers who try the lesson with students, and share their experience with others via the ESIP website

Statement of Work:

We propose to expand the ESIP Wiki website to include a robust set of educator pages which will include one page for each of the ESIP education sessions, including the presenter's powerpoint, any notes they would like to share, links to pages mentioned in their talk, and a discussion forum devoted to ideas and conversations inspired by the presentation.
When this is complete will offer stipends to ESIP teachers who create lesson plans inspired by the presentation and upload them to the website for use by other teachers/educators. But that's not enough. We need to test the lessons, evaluating how well they work the “real world” of kids and classrooms.
We will also offer teachers additional stipends to conduct the lesson and write up an evaluation, along with additional ideas that arise during the lesson's implementation. Teachers could choose to write a lesson plan, implement a lesson and provide a written evaluation, or both.
This effort will be led by Rebecca Reid, who participated in both the 2009 & 2010 ESIP teacher workshops, with assistance from Margaret Mooney, ESIP Education Chair. Along with developing the Wiki pages, Reid will create and post one lesson plan from each year as part of this project and coordinate the stipends (Amazon.com gift certificates). Mooney will advise, review and help edit pages and assist in communications with ESIP educators.