Students Define Sites - Community Feedback Forum - Community Feedback Forum

I would like to request the ability for students to define sites for data entry.

When we had MUC-A-Thons (in Auburn, ME, Durham, NH (for an annual meeting), the Catskills in NY and in Blackhawk County, Iowa,) students entered the data themselves using the school ID and password. For these events, data was collected in 100's of sites. I think asking a teacher to define and enter data for 100's of sites would be prohibitive for these events in the future.

Since we have moved away from the school ID and password, can give students the ability to define sites or find another way for data to be entered for these?

Interesting requirment. How many partners need this capability? If you have done this as a partner, please post a reply to this thread and let us know.

It's not that partners need this, it is that students NEED to enter their own data and teachers NEED their students to enter their own data, including the study sites. If you only look at atmosphere it doesn't seem like it is a big deal to require the site to be defined by the teacher because in general one atmosphere site is defined and used for a very long time. Even with Surface temp. most schools have 2 sites that are used year after year.

Almost all of the other protocols involve multiple sites collected over a relatively small period of time. In order for a school to implement a MUC-a-Thon (for example) each student in the involved class would collect land cover data for 1 or more sites over a day to a couple of weeks. When we did the Black Hawk County Muc-a-Thon we had over 400 new land cover sites in 3 weeks by students of 3 teachers. If those three teachers had had to enter all 400+ of those sites on their own...well we would not have ever set out to do a MUC-a-Thon in the first place. *I* would never have asked that of the teachers I work with. Even having the students enter their own sites one of the teachers and I spent 2 full class days in a computer lab with the MUC-a-Thon kids while another teacher took over her classroom. The new system bars students from ever entering MUC data AT ALL because MUC is defined with the site definition not after. Soils, watershed studies and phenology will have the same problems with teacher only site definition.

It is already difficult for schools to make time to enter data and the vast majority of US schools that "do GLOBE" do not report. We have struggled with that for almost 20 years now. The new requirement that teachers enter the study site BEFORE a student can enter data on the site is just one more barrier to schools fully implementing the program and it is a completely unnecessary barrier.

GLOBE should care about this issue for the reasons above but teachers care for another reason. As educators our goal is to help students learn about science by doing science. If the teacher is the one to enter the data, then what is the student learning? Data entry is the second time the students analyze their own data - first the collect and record it and at that time they are also thinking about what it means for the first time. Then they report it to GLOBE for GLOBE scientists and students to use and they think about it a second time and in a new way. Even for an Atmosphere site used for 15 years, we model that the teachers should have each new class of GLOBE students review the site information and discuss if anything has changed or needs to be added. That is what a scientist would do and that helps the new students take ownership of the site.

The ability to enter and access their own data is foundational to GLOBE.

Also see this thread about the same topic:

http://www.globe.gov/web/community-feedback-forum/discussions/-/message_boards/message/3143652

and I wrote a help ticket about this same issue about 3 weeks ago.