AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 156 Education and Public Outreach for NASA's Universe
Special Session, Wednesday, 2:00-3:30pm, January 11, 2006, Ballroom/Salon 2

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[156.01] High Leverage Outreach to Formal Education

S. Silva (Sonoma State University E/PO)

The Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) Group at Sonoma State University (SSU) develops formal and informal educational products based on several NASA high-energy space missions (GLAST, Swift, and XMM-Newton). Since 2001, the SSU group has managed the Universe Educator Ambassador (EA) program. This program trains exceptional educators in the materials and missions in NASA's Universe division. The EAs then help the SSU group develop, test, and disseminate the materials across the Universe division. Chosen in a national competition, EAs have won prestigious national honors such as the Radio Shack Teacher of the Year award, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math & Science Teaching, and Internet Teacher of the Year. Under SSU's management, the original group of 10 EAs has increased to 20. In a typical year, the EAs hold about 150 workshops at educator conferences that are attended by over 10,000 teachers. This highly successful program now involves six different NASA space science missions and one NASA research center. We will review the EA program and discuss how it has improved not only the quality of our work but also the overall effectiveness and usefulness in the classroom of NASA materials.


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