Session A1:
A Forest at Your Fingertips: Science Education with the Virtual Forest Initiative

Ryan Kelsey, Alice Cox
10:00 AM - 11:15 AM

This session will show how the Virtual Forest Initiative is helping faculty and researchers make use of new media tools to consolidate the activities of the Black Rock Forest Consortium into a publicly available integrated network of research data, curriculum, people, and experiences. The Virtual Forest Initiative aims to develop a breakthrough model for providing researchers, students, and educators an intuitive means to share the activities of the ecological field station at the Black Rock Forest, located 50 miles north of New York City. By leveraging the unique properties of a research forest as a living laboratory, the Virtual Forest's science education platform will promote curiosity of the natural world while helping students synthesize scientific concepts and learn how we come to understand nature and our impacts on natural systems. During this session, the Black Rock Forest Portal, along with online educational modules such as "Forest Sampling Simulation," "Tree Respiration," and "Paleoecology" will be demonstrated.

About the presenters: Ryan Kelsey is the Associate Director of Education and Research for CCNMTL, where he focuses on the Center's overall educational direction and leading the design research and evaluation efforts for the full range of CCNMTL services, projects, and strategic initiatives. FULL BIO -- Alice Cox is an educational technologist at CCNMTL. Alice works mainly with faculty from the sciences, including projects such as Brownfield Action and Frontiers of Science. FULL BIO

Use the NME 2010 Forum to ask questions or to add a comment: http://bit.ly/forum_nme2010

See also:

The Virtual Forest Initiative website