Using NEON Data and Teaching Materials with Your Students | SW2019

As the evolution of data usage in the classroom moves from data to data science, one of the critical needs of instructors and students is accessible, high quality data that scales. 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. The diversity of 180 + data products allows students the freedom to explore their own interests and questions in self-guided inquiry. 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.

Participation in this workshop is limited to registered attendees of the 2019 Bioquest & QUBES Summer Workshop Evolution of Data in the Classroom: From Data to Data Science.  You can register for this workshop and find out more about the conference on the BioQuest & QUBES Summer Workshop page. 

This workshop will focus on three main topics: 

1. Introduction to the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and why you may be interested in using NEON data or protocols with your students
2. Existing Open Educational Resources that use NEON data and are ready for you use in your classroom, with an emphasis on Data Management using NEON Small Mammal Data module (linked below). 
3. Exploring, accessing and using of NEON data 

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.  We will explore both spreadsheet-based and R-based OERs. All participants are encouraged to have R installed on their computer and directions for installation are provided below. However, participants not currently comfortable with using R should not be discouraged from participation in the workshop.  

Workshop Instructors & Helpers

• Megan A. Jones; @meganahjones, Research Scientist, Science Education; NEON program, Battelle
• Alycia Crall; Research Scientist, Evaluation; NEON program, Battelle

Please get in touch with the instructors prior to the workshop with any questions.

Twitter?

Please tweet using the hashtag #NEONData & @NEON_Sci during this workshop!

Before the Workshop

To participant in this workshop, you will need a laptop with the most current version of R, and preferably RStudio, loaded on your computer.

Prior to the workshop you should have R and, preferably, RStudio installed on your computer.

Setting Up R & RStudio

Windows R/RStudio Setup

• Download R for Windows here
• Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
• Go to the RStudio Download page
• Under Installers select RStudio X.XX.XXX - Windows Vista/7/8/10
• Double click the file to install it

Once R and RStudio are installed, click to open RStudio. If you don't get any error messages you are set. If there is an error message, you will need to re-install the program.

Mac R/RStudio Setup

• Go to CRAN and click on Download R for (Mac) OS X
• Select the .pkg file for the version of OS X that you have and the file will download.
• Double click on the file that was downloaded and R will install
• Go to the RStudio Download page
• Under Installers select RStudio 0.98.1103 - Mac OS X XX.X (64-bit) to download it.
• Once it's downloaded, double click the file to install it

Once R and RStudio are installed, click to open RStudio. If you don't get any error messages you are set. If there is an error message, you will need to re-install the program.

Linux R/RStudio Setup

• R is available through most Linux package managers. You can download the binary files for your distribution from CRAN. Or you can use your package manager (e.g. for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base and for Fedora run sudo yum install R).
• To install RStudio, go to the RStudio Download page
• Under Installers select the version for your distribution.
• Once it's downloaded, double click the file to install it

Once R and RStudio are installed, click to open RStudio. If you don't get any error messages you are set. If there is an error message, you will need to re-install the program.

Install R Packages

Please have these packages installed and updated prior to the start of the workshop.

• neonUtilities: install.packages("neonUtilities", dependencies=TRUE); neonUtiltities only works with R version 3.4 or higher. For further directions, see the start of the Use the neonUtilities Package to Access NEON Data tutorial.

Update R Packages

In RStudio, you can go to Tools --> Check for package updates to update previously installed packages on your computer.

Or you can use update.packages() to update all packages that are installed in R automatically.

More on Packages in R