Case Study: Connecticut Middle School Students and WeatherBug Schools® Gain Local Celebrity Status and Greater School Performance via Interactive, Standards-Based Program
How it Works
The WeatherBug
Schools Program all starts with the installation of a WeatherBug Tracking Station
atop the roof of the middle school building. Once installed and linked up to the
Internet through a desktop computer, the school automatically joined the WeatherBug
School Network of over 8,000 Stations across the U.S., the largest weather network
in the world. Nearly 75 percent of US citizens live within 15 miles of a WeatherBug
Tracking Station, mostly located at area schools.
The rooftop WeatherBug Tracking Station at LOLMS is constantly collecting and measuring
data on wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, and 25 other real-time
parameters. All this is constantly transmitted to WeatherBug in Germantown, Maryland.
(To see the live current weather conditions at LOLMS simply go to http://www.aws.com/aws_2001/asp/obsforecast.asp?id=OLYME ).
Each morning the students log in to WeatherBug Achieve. First they take online interactive lessons that teach them how to forecast the weather. The lessons include an online test. The test scores give them instant feedback - and the results are automatically emailed to Dave Fowler, their teacher.
Once the student is comfortable that they've learned how to use their new skills, they move on to forecasting the weather themselves. The students view and compare the weather at LOLMS with weather from nearby Weather Tracking Stations, using the same stations daily - learning about patterns and how to track them day by day. The students then interpret their data and put together a complete and accurate weather prediction.
While they study meteorology (a state mandated requirement) the students learn geography, science, and math, too. Students at LOLMS create weather maps using WeatherBug Achieve - maps fall under Geography. As they observe temperature changes, and how wind and water impacts our world, they are learning Science. Interpreting temperature data invokes math skills - as does comparing those figures using graphs and tables. WeatherBug Achieve focuses on the weather, but it teaches the 3 R's as well.
Sixth grader Rachel Rozanski may not appreciate the scholastic benefits, but she thinks WeatherBug Achieve is "cool." Rachel says, "We learned about barometers and learned to tell what was going to happen by watching the barometer at different times during the day."
There are many more Connecticut Middle School Standards that the WeatherBug Schools Program meets or exceeds not currently used by LOLMS. The WeatherBug Schools Program for Middle Schools also meets Connecticut standards in Astronomy, Force and Motion, Energy Sources and Transformations, and Sound and Light as well as those of Science & Technology and Meteorology used by LOLMS.
