Using NEON Data and Teaching Materials with Your Students

BIOQUEST SUMMER WORKSHOP: WICKED PROBLEMS

Data discovery, manipulation, and analysis are crucial skills for students to be comfortable asking questions using data. As an instructor, you want to be able to use or build teaching materials around data sets that can be used year after year. The standardized data collection and delivery methods for over 180 different data products from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) allow you to use public OERs or build your own materials for your classroom knowing that the same data will be available next year. With this free, standardized data from 81 different NEON field sites from across the US, you can find local or regional data and have students make comparisons across the continent. NEON data can be used at many skill levels; existing OER materials from NEON range from a focus on interpretation of figures to spreadsheet use to reproducible, programming-based data analysis.

In this workshop session, we will spend the first hour exploring open educational resources that use NEON data, with an emphasis on Data Management using NEON’s Small Mammal Data with Accompanying Lesson on Mark Recapture Analysis (McNeil & Jones, 2018). In the second hour, we will use the NEON data portal to directly access NEON data of interest with a discussion of considerations for using the NEON portal and data with students. Participants will leave this session with the tools and comfort level to discover and access data from the NEON data portal and to be aware of and able to use the open educational resources available from NEON.

This session will be presented as a guided navigation through the available resources, therefore, workshop participants should bring a laptop with Excel or Google Sheets (tablets and phones are not ideal) to be able to participate fully in the workshop.

You can also view session information on the BioQuest Summer Workshop page.