Living near a large body of water, like Lake Michigan, can give you a huge appreciation for lake-effect snow. Between Saturday evening and Sunday morning we had nearly 2 feet of snow in much of Berrien County, Michigan, but if you drive just 20 miles away from the lake, most places only received 3 or 4 inches of the white stuff. Needless to say, my wife and I spent a good portion of our day (about 4 hours) shovelling out a path down our driveway until we could get the car out and over to Lowe’s to purchase a new snow-blower. While I was in the middle of clearing a particularly nasty snowdrift halfway down the drive I got to thinking about how many classrooms studying weather will often record and chart the daily weather conditions or amount of snowfall. “If only I had a ruler!” I thought as I heaved aside a shovel-load of packed snow. Then I’d be able to post my measurements online to compare with others around the nation.
Sadly, I never got that ruler, but while watching the evening news, I saw pictures that had been sent into the news station by others doing exactly what I had thought about. Several pictures of kids standing in the snow with yard sticks paraded across the screen, and it hit me. What if you could collect data like snowfall, rainfall, wind-speed, etc. and share it online with other classrooms?
Sure, I’ve had my students use Weather.com to track and record temperatures and snowfall, but there was something unique about the visuals of kids standing in the snow. It sort of made the whole day-long shovelling experience worth while as I could share the image I took above with a school in Vermont that we’re collaborating with online via a forum. There’s quite a popular topic about snow, or the lack thereof this winter, and I thought how great it would be to show them the excitement, relatively speaking, of our huge snowfall. I took that idea and snowballed it (pardon the pun), into another bigger idea. What if there was a website with an interactive map, sort of like Frappr! in which classrooms around the country, or world, could photograph themselves taking measurements and recordings, and then share them online for other classrooms to see. Collecting data, and recording numbers is one thing, but for students to be able to see just how high the snow is, rather than try to figure out how much 22 inches is in their heads, is a much better experience. You could place several similar objects in each location in the snow and compare how much of each is covered, or have each classroom attempt to explain why they’ve had several inches over several days, while another classroom only has a few inches in a week. A great starter for all kinds of research, but unfortunately I haven’t found a site, or have the skills, to create such a tool for sharing. Sure, there are interactive precipitation maps from NOAA, but at times like this I wish I had the “whizbang magic” to produce a website perfectly suited to my needs.
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Ben,
I’m thinking you could do that pretty easily with some coordination ahead of time between the teachers to get things standardized.
With swivel.com you could get a couple of classes exporting their data up and then overlay the data really easily. It allows you to compare data sets without any problem.
Tom
I read your post about Swivel awhile back and it would definitely be a great tool for secondary. I was so fixated on the visual part of it that I forgot most secondary teachers would be more interested in the data and how to effectively graph it, sort it, and otherwise aggregate it.
I think for elementary classrooms though, the visual element of actually seeing the amount of snow, with objects and or people to compare it to would be highly beneficial. Rather than try to visualize in their heads (something difficult for elementary and some middle school students) they could actually see it.
Neat idea. Can we keep it in the forefront for next year so we could start the year off prepared?
Rick
Now that would be a great idea Rick. We could create a Flikr account, or some other easy picture sharing account to easily share the pictures of knee deep snowfall and rulers.