The Jason Project Update

I blogged about the Jason Project last year and decided to revisit the site to see what progress had been made. My original post was entitled Ocean Explorer Brings Undersea Science to Life where students at Internet2 connected schools would be able to view the remote camera images from the sea floor and listen to live conversations among the scientists.

Fast forward to January 2010 and let’s check out the site. It’s called Jason Science and you will need to create a free account to have access to everything in the site.

Let’s take a quick tour. Here is an image outlining the teachers tools availabe. Teachers can use the Jason Lesson Plans and they can customize those lessons to better fit the needs of their students.

Currently three curriculums have been created for the Jason Project – Monster Storms, weather curriculum, Resilient Planet, ecology curriculum and Infinite Potential, energy curriculum. Each lesson has a syllabus, five lessons and a final project for the students. Teachers can download the curriculums or use the online curriculum. A new geology curriculum will be released later this year. There are also 3-D games, roller coaster creator, lab kits, and professional development for teachers.

The philosophy behind the Jason Project is to immerse students in challenging, real-world situations where students are mentored by scientists from NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Geographic Society.

The Jason Project was founded in 1989 and was redesigned in 2007 to include a new curriculum of educational games, videos, live interactivity and social networking that has won five national technology awards. All of the Jason lesson plans are classroom ready and fully scalable and aligned to national and state standards.

To check out the Jason Science site please go to:
http://www.jason.org/public/whatis/start.aspx

Create an account and get started.
Images and information from:
http://www.jason.org/public/whatis/start.aspx