Faculty-Student Partnerships
Faculty and students at Sonoma State University collaborate on various projects that incorporate digital teaching and learning tools. These range from projects designed to enhance the learning of secondary students to those that support preservice and inservice teachers’ ability to infuse technology in instruction. On this page, we highlight some of these collaborative projects as a means for demonstrating what’s possible through such partnerships.
Projects
BirdsEye Detectives: Geospatial Technologies for Multidisciplinary, Locally-Relevant, and Project-Based K-12 Instruction
View the project's main page
Geospatial tools, such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Fusion Tables, dramatically bring the world to students.
Textbook based tables, maps, and texts offer orientation and direction yet do not actively support students in
developing spatial relationships. Through workshops and modules developed using geospatial tools, CSU pre-service
teachers are exploring their local area and their world in new, dynamic ways, eschewing the flat maps and outdated
textbook tables.
BirdsEye Detectives is a project supported by Google and it's promotion of CSU faculty through the Google Faculty Institute. It is common to find professional development workshops dedicated to learning technology that only focus on the tools themselves, not on the integration of the tools into classroom practice. This project disrupts this norm by asking pre-service teachers to learn about geospatial technologies that can promote student-centered learning and spatial thinking.
This site houses modules and workshop materials for use in teacher education programs as well as lessons created by pre-service teachers.
Jessica’s SSU GFI project
SSU Pre-service teacher tech showcase
NASA Education and Public Outreach
Small Satellites for Secondary Students
We are developing a unique three-part pilot program to fill an important "missing link" in NASA's secondary school K-12
educational pipeline. Our program will also be applicable to informal education settings, including summer programs, museums and
technology centers, and afterschool clubs.
Teams Enacting Classroom Change (TECI)
Funded by a grant from the Google Faculty Institute, the Teams Enacting Classroom Innovation (TECI) Project supports teams of
pre-service teachers, cooperating teachers in grade 6-12 classrooms, and university faculty / supervisors in the development and
implementation curriculum units that integrate technology-rich, high-leverage practices in mathematics and science teaching and learning.
The project directors for the TECI project are John Keller (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo), Tara Barnhart
(California State University, Fullerton), Mark Ellis (California State University, Fullerton), Kelly Estrada (Sonoma State University)
and Polly Diffenbaugh, (Stanford University).
Check out the progress
of the TECI Project