SOS Education Forum

The Education Forum is a group of educators, docents, and content creators within the SOS Collaborator’s Network who meet quarterly via online webinar to discuss primarily how SOS can effectively educate K–12 and beyond. Please email hilary.peddicord@noaa.gov to sign up for this group. Click on the links below to access the meeting slides. If a webinar is not hyperlinked, email Hilary to get a link to a recorded webinar for personal viewing only.

October 2024 Webinar

• The Sun Today, is a brief what’s what on space weather events happening this year. The solar cycle is at it’s peak and folks at NOAA Boulder are forecasting the effects of solar storms on the planet. - Shawn Dahl, NOAA Space Weather Predication Center

• Join The Lawrence Hall of Science planetarium team as they share about a new SOS show, The Stormy Sun, that they’ve been showing daily at the science museum in Berkeley. The show uses interactive props and explores the Sun’s magnetic field, sunspots, and solar storms, all in 15 minutes! The team will talk about the process behind making the show and share new Sun assets for SOS that were used. - Ellen Thompson, Bryan Menendez, Ellen Thompson, Lawrence Hall of Science

September 2024 Webinar

• Teek and Tom, a new five-episode animated NOAA video series including two lesson plans per episode, is live October 1 on Ocean Today. In this Education Forum, we discussed how Teek and Tom might be used with SOS programming, then asked Tom our burning NOAA-related questions. For example, what’s up with the Atlantic Hurricane season? Is La Nina forming as expected? When do the new Climate Literacy Principles drop? What’s up at COP27? - Tom DiLiberto, NOAA Communications, star and writer of Teek and Tom, NOAA ENSO forecaster

August 2024 Webinar, August 2024 Slidedeck

• A Python-based Recipe for Weather and Climate Reanalysis Visualization for the Science On a Sphere for Undergraduate Atmospheric Science Students - Kevin Tyle and Ross Lazear, University of Albany, SUNY

April 2024 Webinar, April 2024 Slidedeck, Ron’s ChatGPT Discussion

• Demonstrating techniques for visualizing large 3D datasets for SOS using Blender and ChatGPT - Ron Proctor, Kitt Peak National Observatory / NSF NOIRLab

February 2024 - recording available upon request

February 2024 Slidedeck

• Solar Synoptic Map Building New SOS dataset, what to pair with it in a Heliophysics Big Year solar storytelling presentation, and seeking feedback on a magnetic field new dataset in the making - Bryan Mendez & John Erickson, University of California Berkeley Planetarium at the Lawrence Hall of Science
• Come to the ELP-SOS Joint Workshop at The Wild Center this May 7-9 in Tupper Lake, NY - SOS Team

January 2024 - recording available upon request

January 2024 Slidedeck

• Overview of the National Climate Assessment (NCA5) - Tom DiLiberto, NOAA Communications
• Explaining the latest NASA SVS dataset addition, Carbon Dioxide Tagged by Source - Mark Subbarao, NASA Scientific Visualization Studio
• Demonstrating the new Solar Power Potential - Monthly Average dataset, and the Climate 101 Live Program - SOS Team

November 2023 Webinar - recording available upon request

November 2023 Slidedeck

• Demonstrating Indigenous Territories and Indigenous Languages in honor of Indiginous Peoples’ Month - Juan Pablo Hurtado, SOS Team
• Innovative and creative ways to use SOS in higher education - Carrie Wicker, MSU

August 2023 Webinar, August 2023 Slidedeck

• Demonstrating new SOS datasets, Live Program and activities for the 2023 & 2024 solar eclipses - Beth & Hilary, SOS Team
• Creating SOS datasets with open source tools - Juan Pablo Hurtado, SOS Team

June 2023 Webinar - recording available upon request

June 2023 Slidedeck

• Discussing HOW and WHY you should upgrade your Ubuntu operating system AND upgrading your SOS software - Alex Kirst, SOS Team
• Introducing the latest and greatest features of our SOSx mobile application - Eric Hackathorn, SOS Team

May 2023 Webinar - recording available upon request

May 2023 Slidedeck

• Updates from SOS Team - Archiving datasets
• NOAA-FSU Marine Debris SOS Collaboration - Global Marine Debris Ocean Model - MaryLee Haughwout, NOAA & Tracy Ippolito, FSU
• Tracking Marine Global Microplastics through NOAA NCEI & ArcGIS - Jennifer Webster, NOAA NCEI & Ebenezer Nyadjro, Northern Gulf Institute

April 2023 Webinar - recording available upon request

April 2023 Slidedeck

• SOS Ed Team is creating content for the 2023 and 2024 eclipses, reach out if you would like to be included.
• Exploring Atmospheric Dust and Climate includes an SOS Live Program and is an interactive program created and presented by Melissa Rummel, UCAR/NCAR

March 2023 Webinar - recording available upon request

March 2023 Slidedeck

• SOS Ed Forum Overview & Updates from SOS Team
• Museum of Life and Science with NC State University College of Design- Imagining Speculative Design for User Engagement - Max Cawley, Cole Finney, Dr. Deborah Littlejohn & Design Students

February 2023 Webinar - recording available upon request

February 2023 Slidedeck

• Reminders from SOS Team
• The Wild Center’s Climate Solutions Exhibit - Elodie Linck
• SOS Team – Hot New Datasets!Tsunami: Asteroid Impact - 66 million years ago; Resilient Community

January 2023 Webinar - recording available upon request

January 2023 Slidedeck

• Engaging your community in climate resilience - Carrie McDougall, Senior Program Manager, NOAA Office of Education, NOAA SOS Ed Forum

December 2022 Webinar - recording available upon request

December 2022 Slidedeck

• Hurricane Ian panel with our Florida network members - IMAG History & Science Center, Fort Myers - Christian Gould and Conservancy of Southwest Florida Dalton Discovery Center, Naples - Lori Heath Thorn
• Teaching potentially difficult subject matter: Bouncing forward from the Marshall Fire - HEART Force, CIRES EO - Katya Schloesser
• Using the Science on a Sphere to Connect Communities to Resiliency - Nurture Nature Center - Kate Semmens

November 2022 Webinar - recording available upon request

November 2022 Slidedeck

• Creating datasets in Canva — Patrick Rowley, James E Richmond Science Center
• How to add Live Program datasets to your playlists — Hilary, NOAA SOS
• Sneak Preview of a new tsunami dataset we are making showing the tsunami generated from the meteor that killed the dinosaurs! — Eric Hackathorn, NOAA SOS
• Brief training on taking a video or photo and making a new dataset. — Beth, NOAA SOS

October 2022 Webinar - recording available upon request

October 2022 Slidedeck

• Lightning talk from the SOS Workshop: Big Blue Marble from Geostationary Orbit — Rick Kohrs University of Wisconsin — Madison
• How-to use new search & browse capabilities in SOS Website
• How-to get Hurricane Ian (Spotlights, temporary datasets) on your playlist (forever) AND how-to move Spotlights to site-custom so you can search for them in the iPad and VPLE
• Innovating Methods to Augment Datasets and Presentations — Thomas Quayle, Clark Planetarium

September 2022 Webinar - recording available upon request

September 2022 Slidedeck

• SOS Workshop Lightning Talk — “Exploring Global Environmental Health Challenges and the UN SDGs with First Year University Students” on SOS by Amanda Bodle, James Madison University
• Pandemic and Air Quality Live Program walkthrough. Also available as a story map and an SOSx Tour by Hilary & Beth
• Visual Thinking Strategies approach (as seen in the VTS plenary panel on Day 2 of 2022 SOS Workshop) by Hilary

July 2022 Webinar - recording available upon request

July 2022 Slidedeck

• 2022 SOS Workshop is now virtual, update from Beth
• The Pandemic and Air Quality StoryMap is public!
• NOAA Data in the Classroom, an interactive data exploration tool for formal education presented by Amy Dean, co-creator and high school teacher
• Climate Resilience Activity Book, created by the Nurture Nature Center and NOAA Office of Education is out now! Presented by Kate Semmens, NNC and Maggie Beestra, NOAA

June 2022 Webinar, June 2022 Slidedeck

• 2022 SOS Workshop invitation, should you come?
• June Spotlight on Hurricanes, by Beth
• Kinesthetic and hands-on Science On a Sphere activities from simple to complex, presented by Hilary

April 2022 Webinar - recording available upon request

April 2022 Slidedeck

• University of Albany, State University of New York new member introductions
• NOAA Planet Stewards and the National Ocean Service education materials and content, presented by Bruce Moravchik, NOAA
• Sneak Peek: The Pandemic and Air Quality StoryMap made by the education team at SOS. SOS and SOSx programs coming soon!

March 2022 Webinar - recording available upon request

• New Tonga Atmospheric Shock Wave spotlight dataset by Rick Kohrs, Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin
• Tonga visualizations by Eric Hackathorn, SOS HQ
• Presentation Lizzy Asher, a research scientist at NOAA Chemical Science Laboratory traveled to Reunion Island to make balloonsonde measurements of the Tonga volcano stratospheric plume
• Open discussion: What would you like to see from the SOS Ed Forum? Is our current forum meeting your needs?

February 2022 Webinar - recording available upon request

Folks from Royal Saskatchewan Museum (Regina, Canada), Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (Texas), Dalton Discovery Center (Naples, Florida) as well as a handful of new network members came to get acquainted with us and share their new sphere installation ingenuity. Recently updated Spotlights and how to locate them on the iPad Remote app was also briefly discussed.

January 2022 Webinar

Discussing the latest Shared Socio-economic Pathways climate models that have been added to the SOS Dataset Catalog since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest Annual Report (AR6) First Working Group with NOAA Climate Program Office, Tom DiLiberto.

November 2021 Webinar - recording available upon request

VOLA’s Earth Adventures: An Interactive SOS Program About Earth’s Tilt and Seasons — Patrick Rowley, James E Richmond Science Center will share his latest SOS K-12 seasons program, featuring VOLA (Virtual Orbital Latitude Assistant). The presentation will hopefully inspire similar programs at your SOS site.

October 2021 Webinar

• Patricia Moore, NASA Artemis Mission — Looking for museums to celebrate the progress of the Artemis Mission and going back to the Moon! With Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. We will collaborate with commercial and international partners and establish the first long-term presence on the Moon. Then, we will use what we learn on and around the Moon to take the next giant leap: sending the first astronauts to Mars
• Carrie McDougall — SOS has moved from NOAA Research to NOAA Office of Education! With this comes a new way to think about vetting and expanding the SOS Dataset Catalog. We want your input
• Hilary Peddicord & Eric Hackathorn — Looking at different interpretations of COVID cases

August 2021 Webinar

• Home in the Face of Climate Change — A live program created by Sadie Blancaflor, Hollings Scholar, dealing with the physical displacement of Pacific Islanders, Alaskans, etc. due to the effects of climate change
• Existing climate resources and a quick tour of the new sos.noaa.gov website

May 2021 Webinar

Climate Matters by Climate Central delivered by Bernadette Woods Placky: Resources to make global warming local — Climate Matters is a resource program that helps meteorologists and journalists report on climate impacts and solutions in ways that are local, immediate, and personal. In this presentation, we will review our approach to making a global story local and share ready-to-use graphics and material that you can bring into your work.

April 2021 Webinar

April is Tsunami Awareness Month and SOS, SOSx mobile have all the datasets you need to explore this topic further — Nathan Becker, Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and Leon Geschwind, Inouye Regional Center.

March 2021 Webinar

Using Microsoft PowerPoint for Entry-Level Dataset Creation — Nick VanAcker, Michigan State University; Shilpi Gupta, NOAA SOS.

February 2021 Webinar

Using NASA Earth Observations (NEO) to fill out your Custom Library — Andi Thomas & Beth Russell.

August 2020 Webinar

• Details on Virtual SOS Workshop — Stephen Zepecki
• Using Mentimeter with SOS Explorer® (for teacher workshops) — Patrick Rowley, James E Richmond Science Center, Charles County Public Schools
• New Datasets on Biodiversity and Human Climate Niche — Beth Russell
• Brief Overview of Education Resources for SOS — Data Stories & SOSx Mobile Ideas — Hilary Peddicord

April 2020 Webinar

• Update on Fall or Spring Workshop in Florida — Stephen Zepecki
• Updates from NOAA Boulder (since fall '19) — Keith Searight
• New Datasets — Beth Russell
• Planet Rotations presentation ideas — Eddie Goldstein
• Different methods for continuing to teach with SOS/SOSx and Social Distancing — Hilary Peddicord

March 2019 Webinar

• Updates from NOAA Boulder
  • SOSx Mobile coming out soon!
  • Middle school lessons from JMU
• New datasets in depth (11 new datasets in Feb and Mar!)
• How to add captions to your presentation playlists for narrated movies
• Spotlights
• VPLE Tutorials

May 2018 Webinar

• It’s a zoo out there! — Capturing the pre-K–6th grade audience - Annette Brickley, Buttonwood Park Zoo
• I found a map on the Internet, how do I get it on my sphere?! — Beth Russell, NOAA Boulder SOS Team
• Food web activity — A simple interactive sphere room activity - Stephen Zepecki, NOAA HQ SOS
• 5.3.1 Release, order your dongle!, new datasets including Spotlight — Hilary Peddicord, NOAA Boulder SOS Team

January 2018 Webinar — This Strange Winter! & SOS 5.3 Release

• SOS 5.3 Release highlights — Spotlight datasets, better graphics, etc., Keith Searight, NOAA Boulder
• NGSS alignment with SOS Datasets on the Webpage! Hilary Peddicord, NOAA Boulder
• Thin snowpack in the west, deep freezes in the deep south, snow in Mexico, mudslides in CA… What is happening? How to show it on SOS? Tom DiLiberto, NOAA CPO

September 2017 Webinar — Hurricanes: Watching, Forecasting, Educating

• 5.2.1 SOS Point Release & what’s coming with 5.3, Keith Searight, NOAA SOS
• Earth in True Color (GOES-16) — Real-time, Dan Lindsay, NOAA NESDIS
• Recent Extreme Weather & Seasonal Forecasting, Tom DiLiberto, NOAA NCEP/CPO
• Educating about Hurricanes with SOS, Hilary Peddicord, NOAA SOS

Archived Webinar — Detroit Collaborative Users Network Worshop Recap

• What’s new with SOS? — SOS Boulder Team, Shilpi & Hilary
• Connecting people to science through six degrees of influence — Nurture Nature, Kate Semmes
• SOS programs for Middle School Groups: Ready to implement lessons and a teaching tutorial — JMU, CJ Hartman
• Volunteer and Interns, oh my! Building an efficient training program that increases recruitment and retention — Wild Center, Nick Corcoran

Archived Webinar — Visualizing Change and new “LIFE” datasets in-depth

• Visualizing Change — Aquarium of the Pacific and partners developed new Live Program Series [and so much more] examining the strategic framework around talking about Global Change. — Emily Yam
• Phytoplankton Model — MIT, Stephanie Dutkiewicz
• Coral Bleaching Real-time — National Ocean Service, NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program, Paulo Maurin
• Bird Migration — Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Frank La Sorte

September 2016 Webinar — Visual Playlist Editor — SOS 5.1 How-to

In the SOS 5.1 release, the new visual playlist editor is complete and fully functional as a dataset editor and playlist builder. The Visual Playlist Editor is an interactive playlist editor that visually lays out, modifies, and previews SOS dataset content.

Archived Webinar — Latest and Greatest Content In-Depth

• Forest Change (Extent, Gain, Loss) — Sarah Mann, Global Forest Watch
• Marine Debris: Garbage Patch Experiment — Greg Shirah, NASA GSFC
• Ocean Surface Vorticity — Mathew Maltrud, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• GFS Forecast Models — Real-time (new and improved) — Dan Pisut, NOAA NESDIS
• Tsunami Historical Series — Leon Geschwind, NOAA NOS

May 2016 Webinar — Student-Centered SOS

• Darik Velez , St. Paul’s School — High School Content Creation Class
• Patrick Rowley, James E Richmond Science Center, Charles County Public Schools — SOS Curriculum Building for all ages
• Erik MacIntosh, NOAA HQ, Silver Spring — Straight to the Sphere: Map-Making Activity (Activity Files and How-to PowerPoint Slides)
• Hilary Peddicord, SOS Boulder Team — SOS Explorer® Exhibit and Student Interactive SOS Demo

February 2016 Webinar — Visual Playlist Editor

In the SOS 5.0 release, we added a new playlist editor. The Visual Playlist Editor training at the 2015 Workshop was the most highly attended presentation; therefore, we thought it would be an important new feature to revisit in this forum.

The Visual Playlist Editor is a new interactive playlist editor that visually lays out, modifies, and previews SOS dataset content. It is being released with SOS 5.0 as a “preview edition” to provide the SOS community an early look at what is planned to be a replacement for the existing playlist editor and it represents a major advance in how SOS content and presentations will be created and augmented.

July 2015 Webinar — Live Programs

SOS Hollings Scholar intern, Joe Lilek, was featured in a webinar showcasing live programs. With the introduction of the presenter notes feature on the iPad app, live programs are easier than ever to use, especially since Joe has been busy converting the scripts for many of the existing live programs to presenter notes on the iPad. Joe will describe three new live programs that he created, which incorporate interactive elements. This is also an opportunity for SOS sites to share about their own live programs and their strategies for audience engagement.

Joe’s three new programs are available on the SOS website (linked below) and under Live Programs on your iPad remote.

1. Mitigation or Adaptation: You Decide — Following a broad overview of climate change, audience members are presented with realistic scenarios from around the world: Should we build a resort hotel in Miami Beach? How do we address air pollution in Beijing? How do we feel about longer growing seasons in Greenland? Audience members use clickers to vote on a course of action and the results give a launching point for discussion
2. Deciphering Uncertainty in a Changing Climate — This live program explains the three types of scientific uncertainty: natural variability, model uncertainty, and scenario uncertainty. To better understand the difficulty that comes with communicating uncertainty, audience members play an estimation game to guess the precise percentage of likelihood that corresponds to phrases used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report like “very likely” and “virtually certain”
3. Seeking Common Ground on Climate — This live program explores resources that are shared by everyone on Earth and why international cooperation is vital to confronting climate change. Shared resources are discussed in the context of “the Tragedy of the Commons” and a mock debate between audience members is facilitated to internalize the difficulty and complexity of international climate negotiations

March 2015 Webinar — Hands-on Activities: Used with SOS programs to reinforce subject content and increase understanding

• Stephanie Schollaert-Uz, NASA Goddard, University of Maryland — Did using hands-on activities increase understanding of climate and ocean circulation? Food Web Activity — used with El Nino SOS program
• Dorian Janney, NASA Goddard — Water Falls GPM Mission Education page and Rain Engauge hands-on activities
• Brenna Holzhauer, Aldo Leopold Nature Center — Hands-on activities used with SOS programs
• Hilary Peddicord, NOAA Boulder SOS — Map making activity: How-to add drawings directly to the sphere
• Robin Ramsey, Boonshoft Museum — Hands-on activities used with Plate Tectonics SOS program

September 2014 Webinar — Art & SOS: Making content more meaningful & fun (archive does not have sound)

• Shilpi Gupta, NOAA SOS Boulder — SOS: Cognition + Affect = Effect: A collaborative experiment between artists and scientists
• Robin Ramsey, Boonshoft Museum — Pairing Isabelle Kirkland’s art of biodiversity and extinction with SOS climate change concepts
• Victoria Weeks, Verglas Media — A filmmaker’s perspective of using movies, sound, photography, etc. with docent presentations and custom animations
• Toshi Komatsu, Lawrence Hall of Science — Student-made datasets of exoplanets, a NASA Kepler art and education program
• Jessica Beebe, NASA Wallops — Art & the Cosmic Connection: NASA’s Discovery and New Frontiers Programs

March 2014 Notes — Techniques and applications for engaging your audience

• Introduction to Audience Response Systems (clickers) — Hilary Peddicord, NOAA
• Programming, successes and challenges with iClickers — Robert Morris, Clark Planetarium
• Creating Compelling Stories — Toshi Komatsu, Lawrence Hall of Science
• NESO (NEO + Space Science Data) = Interactive display and analysis tool for accessing near real-time data on SOS — Maurice Henderson, NASA Godddard & Annette Brickley, Ocean Explorium

December 2013 Webinar — New SOS Script: Human Health & Climate Change

• Why use health in climate change education? — Lisa Gardiner, UCAR
• Script and new datasets — Eryka Thorley, UC Denver/ NOAA
• What is Dengue and how is it spreading? — Mary Hayden, NCAR

September 2013 Notes — How to utilize partnerships for supplementing your programming and creating content

• Ocean Explorium / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
• Science Museum of Minnesota
• University of Colorado graduate student & Boulder SOS team
• Q/A / Check-in — What’s new in the network?

June 2013 Notes — Community engagement activites

• From Risk to Resiliency — Kate Brandes, Nuture Nature Center
• Summer of Discovery — Bryan DeBates, Space Foundation
• Google Hangouts with SOS — Laura Allen, AMNH
• Q/A — utilizing member expertise for new sites, ex. South Florida Science Museum

March 2013 Notes — SOS educational techniques

• Preview of a 100th Installation Tribute video clip
• Update from NOAA Boulder on Teacher PD: Summer workshop — making the SOS experience ‘active’ for students
• Next steps in SOS education from Britta Culbertson, NOAA Office of Education Einstein Fellow Distinguished Educator
• Update from Lawrence Hall of Science’s Sherry Hsi on Math on a Sphere
• Update from Space Foundation’s Amy Robinson on new K–12 programming and activities
• Q/A and other updates from the Network

Decmeber 2012 Notes — Welcome to the group!

• SOS Collaboration Wall overview — GoTo Meeting Webinar
• Suggested share one item on the Discussion Wall or Files & Documents page before the holidays to help populate and get used to the format of the new collaboration space
• Discussion: Why did you join this group? How do you envision this group supporting you in your mission?
• What’s happening with SOS at your site — successes and struggles — that we should know about?