The August 2013 News and Notes from PAESTA has been sent out. You can view it online via this link.

Start your school year off right learning new techniques and strategies for taking a standards-based approach to science testing. Only a few seats are left for the AAAS Developing and Using Assessments Aligned to Science Learning Goals workshop, August 7–9 in Washington, DC.

Don’t miss this opportunity. Register today!

A new annotated guide to written, web, and audio-visual resources for teaching about planets orbiting other stars is now available for high-school and college instructors, their students, informal educators, and astronomy enthusiasts.  Materials in the guide to this rapidly-changing branch of astronomy include video and audio files of lectures and interviews with leading scientists in the field, phone and tablet apps, a citizen-science web site, popular-level books and articles, and much more.

Join us for the 2nd Annual PAESTA Conference this fall in Media, PA! Our conference theme is Mapping Our Way as Educators: Leaders In and Out of the Classroom. We will begin Friday evening, October 4, with the movie Extreme Ice (video preview) and a follow-up discussion session, then continue on Saturday, October 5, with a full day of sessions. This year, we will have two keynote sessions.

Over the course of 26 years at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), Eugenie Scott has worked to defend the teaching of evolution and climate science in public schools by providing resources to teachers, schools, and citizens and by working on legal aspects of these issues at the local, state, and national levels. Scott, who was appointed as executive director of NCSE in 1987, recently announced her intention to retire from that position.

CAMEL is a free multimedia resource for educators, providing over 300 interdisciplinary topic areas and numerours resource types to teach climate change causes, consequences, solutions and actions. Educators can create courses, textbooks, administer exams & surveys, invite others and collaborate around teaching materials, strategies and assessment.

The July 2013 News and Notes from PAESTA has been sent out. You can view it online via this link.

Life in the Ancient Seas at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History will close permanently on September 30, 2013, as the Smithsonian begins the Fossil Halls renovation. Over 1,000 marine fossils, including trilobites, a mosasaur, and an early penguin will remain on view for only three more months.