“From NSTA Reports: “Using the National Science Digital Library”
Emphasizing the importance of, “Let(ting) teachers know what you are and how you can facilitate their research to improve STEM teaching,” the National Science Teachers Association highlighted current NSDL efforts to do just that in a November 4, 2006 article. From the NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar Series, designed to reach out to teachers offering topics such as birds, bones, and plate tectonics, to the Teacher Professional Continuum (TPC) project “Digital Libraries Go to School,” aimed at improving K-12 STEM instruction, NSDL outreach activities help teachers find shortcuts to locating what they are looking for at no cost, while showing them how to adapt resources to their classrooms. Dean Krafft, the principal investigator for the NSDL Project at Cornell was quoted in the article: “I believe we have the tools, the momentum, and the community to make NSDL a new, vibrant, and transformational digital library, and a critical resource for everyone who teaches, uses, or learns about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

NSDL Goes to School: An Outreach Project Update
The Digital Libraries go to School (DLgtS) project helps K12 educators create learning activities with NSDL resources to teach science and math in their classrooms. Now eight months into the three-year project, DLgtS project staff at Utah State University, UCAR and SUNY Cortland have begun a series of workshops with in-service and pre-service teachers in Utah and New York, which introduce participants to NSDL with a just-in-time tutorial and then provide instruction on assembling NSDL resources into learning activities using the Instructional Architect (IA) tool. Often participants don’t know that NSDL is a digital library; however, they are enthusiastic about having one place where they can find quality science and math “online stuff.” The teacher-created learning activities are being used by peers who have not attended the workshops, and in one instance, a workshop participant has been designated to regularly create learning activities for colleagues using NSDL and the IA tool. As the project continues, a Review Committee will develop a rubric to review teacher-created learning activities that will be contributed to NSDL as a special collection. Additionally, a communication network will be established to support interactions between in-service teachers who are using online learning activities in their classes and to support mentoring relationships between in-service and pre-service teachers.

To extend the impact of the DLgtS activities, Project Tomorrow, a non-profit organization, has received supplemental funding from NSF and is partnering with Utah State University and UCAR to implement Project TestDrive: NSDL. During the 2006-2007 school year, Project Tomorrow will recruit teachers and students from 150-200 schools nationwide to “testdrive” NSDL online resources, and provide feedback through surveys and focus groups on factors that contribute to high-impact, pedagogically sound STEM resource creation and use.

The Digital Libraries go to School and Project TestDrive: NSDL activities support the outreach goals of NSDL while also providing critical data, through rigorous evaluations, about the uptake and use of online STEM education resources in classrooms. Further, by receiving funding from NSF’s Teacher Professional Continuum program, these projects demonstrate that the infrastructure, resources and community around NSDL can support the goals of a wide range of NSF programs.

NSDL Materials Science Pathway (MatDL) in Beijing
At the October 2006 20th International CODATA Conference, MatDL co-chaired a pre-conference workshop on Materials Data and led the session on “Integrating Materials Research and Education.” CODATA, the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, is an interdisciplinary Scientific Committee of the International Council for Science (ICSU), and sponsors the Biennial CODATA International Conference on data. “Data have become both more accessible and more necessary to maintain; more abundant and more complex to manipulate; more global and more expected to share.”