School of Ice

This is my second time participating in the School of Ice Program after 6 years. I know the first workshop provided some foundation for me to integrate and establish three curriculums for the labs in my Climatology class. Those are the Oxygen Isotope Exercise, sea ice versus land ice and sea-level rise, and thermohaline (salty cold dense ocean water versus hot less dense water) lab exercises. I feel comfortable to include three other lab exercises including Isotopic analysis with pennies, atmospheric CO2 measurement, Slip Sliding Away, and two great virtual labs by Drs. Osterberg and Kelly. I am so glad I participated in this workshop. Some of the contents I did not feel using or integrating or using the lab exercises in my Climatology and few for Environmental Science class (esp. atmospheric CO2 and sea-level rise exercises), I will be able to integrate into my curriculum for the Climatology class I am teaching in the fall of 2020 and Environmental Science class in the spring of 2021. I think tremendous benefits came from both workshops I have participated in along with the Scool of Rocks and AMS Diversity workshops. If it was not a workshop like this, I would not feel comfortable teaching my advanced Climatology class and offer the labs for the class full of hands-on exercises conveniently available for the students. By attending this workshop, I am really happy to know we will be getting supplies for the few hands-on activities of our choice for the students in my our classes. This is great. Every minute of my time was worth this workshop and I am very grateful for this workshop and NSF for funding the program and us. 

The School of Ice has been a wonderfully rewarding teacher experience.  I went in to the professional development with some decent background on the poles and I left with a wealth of resources and knowledge about the evidence of climate change.  The professionals hosting the School of Ice were very inclusive, supportive, and efficient at the many facets of putting something like this together from the well-organized lab kits and how to use them to their technologically verse abilities in the best teaching practices associated with NGSS and experience with fringe data from the poles.  A variety of participants were experienced to best virtual practices as well which is very helpful to be on the student side of high expectations and technological literacy.  I walked away with an appreciation for all of the work that not only goes into the efforts of research scientists about the evidence of climate change, but how to really teach it using best practices.  There is not one speaker, lab, or presentation we experienced that wasn’t useful in my classroom.   Rest assured that there will be a definite impact in my teaching, my classroom, and my personal gain from this rigorous and comprehensive virtual professional development.  I would heavily recommend this course to any of my fellow earth science colleagues.

I teach earth science and environmental science to non-science majors. Sometimes it is difficult to make them understand the concepts of science. The lab activities presented in the workshop helped to formalize such concepts. From the workshop I gained knowledge about past climate, and proxy data analysis through the wonderful presentations of Prof. Erich Osterberg, Bess Koffman, Meredith Kelly and Bob Howley.

Many of the concepts of climate change were known to me as theory. Through this workshop I learned and imbibed practical knowledge to use these as a model in classroom teaching and create a positive impact in the learning process. Each and every lab activities from Polar opposites like making venn diagram to CO2 measurements were very impactful and has opened new arenas of teaching climate change. I learned how a critical concept like Thermohaline circulation can be made as a teaching model with simple things like water and food dye.

I am writing this letter to express my reflections about participating in the Virtual School of ice workshop-Summer 2020. First, I would like to thank both of you for an amazing workshop and healthy environment. I do not have enough vocabulary words to express my gratitude. However, the workshop was over my expectation as the first time I participate virtual workshop. The workshop was successful in terms of education, diversity, collaboration, and knowledge exchangeable. It provided me ways and methods to demonstrate scientific facts over climate change using ice cores and paleodate. The workshop provided wide information about climate change. Methods and experiments are used in the workshop over climate change topic were very useful and informative to pass explain the issues of climate change to students and society. Finally, all facilitators were successful to run the workshop. I felt a healthy environment with diversity and inclusion. This workshop gave opportunities to all participants to learn and pass the knowledge to recent and future generation about climate change. I would love to participate in this workshop again and recommend it to everyone who wants to improve his/her knowledge about using ice cores and other proxies to study climate change.