NASA’s multimedia exhibits and educational resources are now available to educators for classroom use through the Apple Learning Interchange (ALI) online educational environment.
NASA’s educational technology team, led by staff from NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Filed, Calif., is disseminating NASA’s mission and research-based instructional content to support professional educators as they strive to improve the quality of teaching and learning.
“Both the Apple Learning Interchange and NASA’s Office of Education have similar goals in striving to provide educators with educational technology resources that model and facilitate effective teaching methods, so we are very excited to work toward this common goal together,” said Christina O’Guinn, lead for the NASA Ames educational technology team.
The “Teaching & Learning” section of ALI includes lessons, media-rich exhibits and events appropriate for classroom use. With the help of Apple Computer, Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., several NASA educational technology products that have already become popular among educators and students will now be available to a wider audience.
The first exhibit that launches this week features a new microgravity challenge on NASA Quest. This challenge asks students to design analogs for microgravity that could be used to test new technologies such as the Personal Satellite Assistant.
As students develop their solutions over the next few months, they will be able to pose questions to NASA engineers, receive feedback on their preliminary designs and participate in live, interactive Web casts with NASA engineers who will draw connections from students’ designs to actual NASA missions.
In coming months, additional NASA programs will be available through ALI. One program is “Astro-Venture,” an interactive, educational, multimedia Web environment where students in grades five through eight role play NASA researchers, scientists and engineers using scientific inquiry, as they search for and design a planet with the necessary characteristics for human habitation.
Another program to be available on ALI is an interactive Web site for students and teachers to learn more about NASA technologies. The site has inquiry-based lessons, interactive multimedia activities and video animations focusing on systems, forces and motion, engineering design, volume and surface area.
Future NASA Quest challenges also will be highlighted through ALI. “We look forward to reaching a larger audience of teachers and their students with all of this content through ALI,” said O’Guinn. This agreement also will facilitate support of NASA-related Web casts through the “Digital Learning Events” section of ALIinnovative.
“By supporting our teachers with standards-based resources and models of effective instruction, we can improve teachers’ instructional skills and excitement about the crucial subject areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” said O’Guinn.
The addition of NASA Ames’ educational technology resources augments the current resources available on ALI from NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va. These include digital versions of NASA educational television programs such as NASA CONNECT and Destination Tomorrow.
To log onto the Apple Learning Interchange, visit:
For information about other NASA education programs on the Internet, visit:
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