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ADEPT2 Project Outreach
Overview The ADEPT 2 Project has undertaken three major education and outreach efforts during the first three years of the project: Activity: Creation of a forestry career and resource website to encourage rising college students to consider careers and fields of study in forestry and natural resources. Result: The website
has been live since March, 2008 and has undergone continuous updating
and improvement, incorporating a search engine for the education page,
a site statistics page, and self-submitting biographical page.
Marketing of the site through the NAUFRP membership (the organization
representing all educational institutions in the US with forestry and
natural resource programs) has led to a rapid rise in viewer ship. We
have received many accolades from member institutions. Activity: Development of a genomics workshop designed to deliver background and lesson plans on genomic tools and their application for agronomic, horticultural and forestry crops and targeting middle / high school teachers representing districts with under-represented student bodies. Results: The
workshop was created and run through the South Carolina DNA Learning
Center at Clemson in June, 2008. The event was attended by 17
middle and high school teachers who received graduate credit for the
weeklong event that included classroom wetlab, computer lab and field
components and delivered a number of pre-packaged lesson plans for teachers
to take home. Teacher response was overwhelmingly positive. Activity: Support of a Kenan Fellow to create lesson plans on tree genetic improvement and application of genomic tools in agriculture. Results: Harold Mackin, a candidate from Washington State, was selected to receive a Kenan Fellowship sponsored by the ADEPT2 project. Harold participated in two weeks of Kenan Institute workshops and four weeks of direct mentoring from project scientist this summer. He is currently building curricula that will describe the tree improvement process and how genomic tools are being used in genetic improvement programs today. Genomics Workshop: Genomic Tools and their Applications [Sponsored collaboratively
by ADEPT and Fagaceae Genomic Tool Development projects. ADEPT 2 committed to the delivery
of a continuing education / outreach effort to inform upper level K-12
teachers on current developments in genomic sciences and application
of genomic tools in agriculture, horticulture and forestry. In
June, 2008, we presented a 5-day workshop at the South Carolina DNA
Learning Center located at Clemson University. The workshop, attended
by 17 teachers from Florida (10), Texas (6) and Washington (1) states,
was offered as a three-credit class (Genetics 730): most participants
took advantage of the credit. Teachers represented districts with
significant enrollment of under-represented groups including African-American,
Hispanic and American Indian populations. The workshop was designed to
provide classroom, wet-lab, and computer instruction modules.
In addition, we spent a half-day in the field studying peach breeding
and how genomic tools are used in horticultural practices. Of
course, we ate peaches as well, which seemed to reinforce much of the
science message being presented. We intentionally attempted to
provide teachers with several lesson plans or experimental plans for
in-class use, including provision of a kit for bacterial transformation
to be used in their own classes. All teachers were required to
create a poster illustrating lessons they learned at the course, and
which would be of utility in their classroom. Posters
Instruction was provided by
ADEPT team members Gary Peter and Nicholas Wheeler, the Learning Center’s
primary instructor, Renea Hartwick, and another NSF recipient, Albert
Abbott. Funding for the workshop was provided by ADEPT and yet
another NSF sponsored project, Genomic Tool Development for the Fagaceae.
The latter project is managed by Wheeler (PI ?Dr. Ron Sederoff, NCSU),
and has a significant science and outreach effort at Clemson (Dr. Jeff
Tomkins). The Learning Center provided two forms of evaluation for the course: one was pre- and post-workshop knowledge assessment of what teachers knew about genomics/genetics disciplines. The other was simply a course evaluation completed at the end of the course. Overall, teacher evaluations were very encouraging and strongly supportive for virtually all aspects of the workshop, from choice and delivery of science topics to individual instructors. Many useful comments were submitted. It is clear that many of our teachers were “stretched?by the information presented, but seemed to “pick up steam?as we moved along. We learned that still more lab exposure is desired, and that there is a great need for this type of material. The results from the pre- and post- knowledge assessment also reflect that the teachers felt they learned a great deal in this workshop. The DNA Learning Center is particularly well suited to delivering this material and we support their continued efforts in this area. This represented the first time the Learning Center has catered to an out-of-state audience. In short, the workshop was a considerable success in our view. Kenan Fellowship
The Kenan Fellows
Program for Curriculum and Leadership Development(http://www.ncsu.edu/ The ADEPT2 program is sponsoring
a Kenan Fellow for the two-year program that commenced in April of 2008.
The Fellow chosen for the program was Harold Mackin from Rochester High
School in Washington State. Harold was chosen the National Agri-Science
Teacher of the Year for 2006, maintains a highly respected FFA and Agriscience
program in his district and routinely takes students to national and
international Agriscience fairs and tours. His mission is to create
course curricula that can be used in classroom and FFA settings that
describe crop improvement concepts and the application of genomic tools
in plant and animal breeding programs. Project results will ultimately
be posted on special websites created by the Fellow in conjunction with
the Kenan program. Harold attended the Clemson
Genomics workshop (noted previously in this report) and a two-week series
of workshops in Raleigh, NC, provided by the Kenan Institute.
He will attend another two weeks of Raleigh workshops in 2009.
Each year he also receives 4 weeks of direct mentoring from our project
scientists. We are highly impressed with the quality and professionalism of the Kenan Program and results obtained from their Fellows.
Forestry Careers and Resource Website (www.forestrycareers.org )
Workshop:
During the summer of 2006 we hosted a small workshop for three middle
and high school teachers at North Carolina State University. The
purpose of the workshop was to determine how best to reach out to students
about to enter college and promote college degree programs, and ultimately
careers, in forestry and natural resources. Workshop attendees
and project cooperators Barry Goldfarb and Nicholas Wheeler concluded
that a website best met our needs. The outline for the site was
developed and a series of interviews were conducted to form the basis
of our “biography?component of the website. We attempted
to create a site that was inviting to under-represented groups by including
a diversity page and seeking biographies from representative groups. Site Construction: Over the ensuing 6-12 months materials were collected to fill out databases to be used in the site. We focused our efforts on
The web design firm Toolhouse
(http://www.toolhouse.com/ Marketing and Revisions:
Our primary marketing efforts for the site have been through the membership
of NAUFRP, the National Association of Universities with Forestry and
Natural Resource Programs. In August, 2008, we provided a poster
which provided information on the website. They were asked to
forward the poster to all of their member institutions, who in turn
may use the poster in their own recruitment mailings. This approach
has the potential to market the site to virtually every high school
in the 50 states! As these recruiting efforts take place we anticipate
a growing audience. Our viewership has indeed picked up since
the mailing. The page has also been sent to all FFA organizations
in the US as well as the listserv for the national science teachers?
organization. The site has been picked up by many institutions such
as the Dept. of Natural Resources in Indiana (http://www.in.gov/dnr/ NAUFRP members have made literally dozens of requests for revisions and these have been handled at UC Davis within days, often within hours of the requests. Since the site went live, there have been a number of significant and major improvements. These include:
Statistics:
A site statistics page has been created which provides a virtually up
to the minute census of hits and background information that is very
useful to us (http://forestrycareers.org/
* Not viewed traffic includes traffic
generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes.
How is this information to
be interpreted? The data for August suggests that there were 1042
unique visitors to the site, and some of them visited more than once
(Total number of visits = 1,543). The average visitor viewed a
little over 4 pages and poked around a great deal (informed by the number
of hits). Hits reflect that visitors may have gone to several
of the bio sketches or college websites listed in the site.
We are encouraged to see the number of visitors climb as the new school
year begins and our marketing efforts are beginning to take effect. A visit to the stats page will show the wide range of other information available including number of visits by day, by hour, by day of the week, from robots and spiders, from top host sites etc. The duration of visits is recorded, as are the favorite pages at the site. The careers and education pages are clearly the targeted favorites with emphasis on Fish/Wildlife and Parks/Recreation sub-disciplines. |
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