T208 Climate Literacy: Formal and Informal Education and Community Outreach Efforts to Enable Responsible Decisions I

Tuesday, 29 October 2013
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 405

REACHING MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS THROUGH EMAIL LISTS, FACEBOOK, AND WEB POSTINGS THE RESULTS OF SHARING CLEAN CLIMATE AND ENERGY ONLINE TEACHING RESOURCES

Paper number: T208-5
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:50 AM – 9:05 AM

Authors

Abstract

The CLEAN (Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network) collection consists of peer-reviewed online teaching materials for middle school, high school, and college teachers including videos, classroom activities, and visualizations. It includes a search engine that points to annotations and the resources, which number more than 500 and have been selected from over 14,000 reviewed resources.

During the past year, we have informed teachers about CLEAN's peer-reviewed teaching resources through email lists, web postings, Facebook, and Twitter. A significant portion of the effort involved identifying contact people in state science teacher associations, state departments of education, and other organizations who would share information via emails or by posting information on the web. We tracked the impact of our efforts using a customer relationship management tool and web statistics.

Results showed that we reached the greatest number of teachers across the country via state science teacher association email lists under the umbrella of the National Science Teachers Association, and email lists operated by state departments of education. Other means of outreach included getting information about the CLEAN collection posted on websites, Facebook, and Twitter of science organizations, private companies, or informal Facebook groups. Web statistics on the CLEAN website indicate almost a doubling of visits in the spring and summer of 2013 compared to 2012, with substantial peaks in visitation from certain states following listserv mailings by department of education representatives in those areas.