Engaging the NAGT membership in creating web resources

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Engaging the NAGT Membership in Creating Web ResourcesThis project pilots the use of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) website to showcase the educational work of members, sections, and the national organization; and fosters improved communication both within and beyond the organization. At the same time, the project explores the potential for creation of thematic collections on topics of high interest to the geoscience community that can be shared with DLESE. Our work taps the field-trip expertise of the NAGT membership to create materials about both the design and management of field trips for a wide variety of educational and professional audiences. An important part of the website content is the collection of field trip guides and materials. These guides are frequently unpublished or published in literature that is not well indexed. The collection of these materials on the NAGT site and the ability to discover them through DLESE creates a critical resource for teachers and faculty teaching in the field about local geology. NAGT is well positioned to create such a resource because field trips and field geology play a central role in the activities of eight regional sections in the United States and Canada, and because much of the needed technical infrastructure for creating such a collection is in place at the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) which hosts the NAGT website. This project will involve modifications of the SERC content management system to enable contribution and editing of web resources by individual NAGT members, and to support development of interfaces and help documentation for the system. These are the critical steps needed to support development of a thematic collection on field trips and additional collections by NAGT members and members of other groups that use the SERC content management system for website creation.