How to use DICCE-Learning Environment (LE)

What is DICCE-LE? DICCE lets you take images from DICCE- Giovanni (DICCE-G) and put them into activity worksheets for your students. It is a user protected area – you are registered to use it as an author It allows you to share your worksheets and images with other teachers

How is DICCE LE structured? “Projects” are forms you fill out that contain overview information about the set of activities that you create for the project, plus additional resources you want your students to be able to use as they do the activities “Activities” are worksheets around the images that you select “Trend tables” are tables you can create for your project that students can fill out to see if there are climate change trends in the geographical area they are investigating. To ponder if there are true trends, rather than just natural variability, students should look at time series graphs to

How is DICCE LE structured? (continued) There are “Help tools” for your students in the form of tutorials about DICCE data visualizations, links to NASA glossaries, and measurement conversion support. There are “View” windows for looking at your curricular products and accessing your authoring options. There are “Edit” windows for authoring and editing and publishing your content for other registered DICCE LE users

How do students work with DICCE- LE? You print out your projects for your students to see on paper or you save them as PDF files, which are online printouts. Students can also do the projects in “Show All” mode, which makes the Help Tools available to them through links. Students can answer the questions in their notebooks but see the images and questions in color on the printouts. Students can make any image larger by clicking it.

What you should have done before starting to use DICCE-LE You should have gone into DICCE-G to generate images you want your students to investigate, then saved those images to your hard drive as image files For geo-referencing, you may have instead decided to save your DICCE-G images as “kmz” layers in Google Earth, then added highways or cities etc., then from Google Earth saved the images to your hard drive.

But, rest assured…. You can always edit or even delete your projects and their activities, even after you’ve published them (i.e., made them available to other DICCE teachers). So, if you don’t have all your images ready when you start authoring in DICCE LE, that’s OK.

DICCE LE workflow for authors 1.Go to 2.Log in (your username and password are both your first initial and last name (for example, “dzalles” for Dan Zalles) 3.Create a project - 4.Title the project !!!! 5.Fill out the other fields 6.Save the project!!! 7.View the project 8.Edit the project if needed, but always save your edits!!!

Authoring activities 1.Create your first activity for the project 2.Title the activity !!! 3.Fill out the other activity fields, including inserting images 4.Save the activity!!! 5.View the activity 6.Edit the activity if needed, but always save your edits 7.Add more activities if you want

DICCE LE workflow – trend table (optional) Add a trend table at the project level, which students can use as they do your activities Title the trend table Specify the activity titles, image titles, and data ranges of the images in the appropriate columns Save the trend table View the trend table Edit the trend table if needed, but always save your edits Add student access to the Help Tools

DICCE LE workflow - publishing Publish when you are ready to make your projects and activities available to other teachers for viewing

This is the main DICCE LE page, which you see first You can return to the main page any time by clicking this Click this to log in or out. Note: your students can use DICCE LE without logging in. They just can’t edit or add anything. They should answer the questions in other files (MS Word, etc) or on paper.

Click this to create a new project

1.Enter a title for your project 2.Then complete the other fields. 3.Save your draft 4.View the draft Each project, activity, or trend table you create is done on a special “Edit” form, like this one for projects. Note: The “Helps” include tutorials, links to NASA glossaries, and measurement conversion supports. They are meant for your students. Go to the DICCE wiki under General Resources to preview them or print them out. When doing DICCE projects, students can open them on their computers when in “Show All” mode. Click here when you are ready to publish the project

This is the “View” of your project, on the “View Window.” It is your project’s home page and the place from which you add or edit the project information and the activities and trend tables in your project Click to add an activity to your project

Click this to create a brand new activity of your own for your project

Use this “Edit” form to create your activity. As with projects, title it first, then add other fields, save it and view it Click this to bring an image into your activity

This is the tool for putting images into your activity, either from your computer or from the DICCE-LE media library (every image that any author puts into an activity is automatically archived in the media library for others to use) Click this to retrieve an image from your computer to put into the activity Toggle between grabbing images from your computer or from the media library. The default is from your computer. NOTE: All images users put into DICCE LE get added to the Media Library

The image appears. If this is the one you want, click to insert it, or delete it and start over again.

This is what an activity could looks like in the Activity “View” Window Click your project title here to return to the Project home page

Now you are back at your project home page, from where you can add new content or print the project out for your students. Note: a project at minimum must have 1 activity! Click here to add a trend table to your project (optional)

Why make a trend table? Let’s say you’ve created an activity containing time series graphs about four different types of data and you want your students to analyze each for whether it shows a trend. You create a trend table, with one row for student analysis of each graph.

After you create your trend table, this is how it would appear in your project (see the bottom), with images from one of your activities above the trend table. Students analyze whether each time series may show a true change trend (as opposed to natural variation), and explain their reasoning.

This is how that same content would appear if you printed the project out

If you click “See All Projects,” these lists appear. All the projects you authored are at the top, including those in draft” form, followed by all published projects in the archive. If you publish a project, it will appear in both lists.

From your “Edit Project” window, click to publish your project when ready. Publishing makes it viewable by other DICCE teachers and staff only. Clicking this allows you to make a copy of your project.

Notice how your newly published project is no longer listed as a “draft.” Yet, after you publish, you can still edit and update your projects (plus their activities and trend tables too).

This is how your students can view the project and its activities on their computers, provided they have selected “Show All.” Or, they can see a print out of the project.

The Help Tools you select for your students are made available through links at the bottom of the project. Students can open these Helps in a new tab or in a new window. In this example, the student is opening the “Time Series Help” in a new window.

Below, the student has opened the time series help and resized his windows to be able to view the project and the Help text at the same time.

This is the top section of same project as it would appear to the student on a printable version rather than in the Show All mode. NOTE: the printable version does not print out the Help Tools. You would need to print those out separately, which you can do from the DICCE wiki or when you are in Show All mode.

QUESTIONS? Contact Dan Zalles, DICCE Principal Investigator Other important DICCE links: 1. To DICCE-Giovanni (DICCE G) 2. To the DICCE wiki (protected area for sharing files among DICCE team members): or