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Newton Network Newsletter – September 2008

Newton Network News:

Welcome back! We hope that you had a productive and refreshing summer.  We have stayed quite busy this summer with improvements and additions to our website. In appreciation for assisting us, we send a special thanks to all the teachers who helped by reviewing the teaching resources pages and providing excellent feedback.

In this issue we will take a look at the success of NERDS, NESSI and the summer math and engineering camps.  We have additional information on the American Chemical Society meeting as well as an educational opportunity in climate science and global change.

Once again, please pass your newsletter on to your colleagues, and let them know that they can sign up for their own newsletter as easily as going to our website (www.unr.edu/newton).

In This Issue:

Regional/Statewide:

ACS Meeting - Chemistry teacher education program

NCAR eCourses – National Center for Atmospheric Research teacher education

ISEF 2009 – Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2009

NERDS/NESSI/Summer Camps –  A successful summer of activities

Newton Website – Additional Resources you can use

ACS Meeting – The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced that their September 2008 meeting in Las Vegas will include an education program featuring sessions focused on teaching middle school and high school chemistry.  The ACS informational flyer can be found at (ACS WRM Poster) and the schedule for the sessions is found at (ACS WRM Educational Program Information)

NCAR eCourses – The National Center for Atmospheric Research is offering a series of online courses in climate science and global change as a professional development opportunity.  Additional information and registration information can be found on the NCAR website at (http://ecourses.ncar.ucar.edu/)

ISEF 2009 – The world’s best young scientists are coming to Nevada.  This is the Olympics of science fairs with an estimated 1200 – 1500 high school competitors from more than 45 countries.  These students started at local school competitions and have advanced through regional and national competitions to reach this level.  The competition will be held May 10-16, 2009 in Reno and is being organized by Gathering Genius, Inc.  Information about attending or assisting with the event is available at (http://www.gatheringgenius.com)

NERDS/NESSI/Summer Camps - Nevada Educators Really Doing Science (NERDS), Nevada Earth/Space Science (NESSI) and a variety of summer camps were great successes again this year.  We will be posting announcements of these events for next year once the dates are set.  Stay tuned for the breaking news and enroll early as space is limited. 

Newton Website – We view our website as a level of communications with all of you and are striving to make it useful, informative and easy to navigate.  This summer we revamped the navigation of the website by adding a quick-link menu bar at the top and bottom of each page, indexed many of our longer pages and provide topic links from the text on our home page.  All this to make finding information quicker and easier for you.

 We have also added to the information available through our website.  We started a collection of lesson plans, classroom activities, webquests, podcasts and a section of lessons of local interest all related to teaching science and math.  All of the resources we list are based on teaching standards, and are currently maintained and available on the internet free of charge.  All together, we were able to located more than 2,000 ready to use teaching resources.  Check out what we found by clicking Teaching in the quick link menu from any page of our website (http://www.unr.edu/newton)

We also updated our connections page by adding important connections at the Nevada Department of Education and the Regional Professional Development Programs. 

We would very much appreciate your feedback on these changes to the website, especially if you know of teaching resources you wish to share with other teachers.  Please email your comments or contributions to Robert Newbury at  rnewbury@unr.edu.

Want more information about the Newton Network?

The Newton Network Newsletter works both ways – we send information to you, but you can send questions to us; if we don’t have the answer right here, we will find it for you.

Check us out at www.unr.edu/newton, contact Robert Newbury at rnewbury@unr.edu, or Michael Leverington at michael@edtech-teched.com.

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