News, Ideas, To-Do

Use this space to share notes, ideas, list of things to do, whatever....

Let's meet at the IVOA Interop meeting 19-23 May 2008: Trieste, ITALY ( http://www.si.inaf.it/ivoa_interop_2008/ )

We have the room Vulcania 2 reserved for our WP5 meeting on Wednesday 21 from 14:30 to 16:00. The room has wi-fi and projector. If we will need more time, we will have to move to Vulcania 1 after 16:00, but, hey, it is the free afternoon....!

Here is an idea for the program:

• Introduction and review of our program for WP5 (Massimo Ramella)
• Requirements (Massimo Ramella)
• Outreach Aladin (CDS)
• Outreach VirGO+Stellarium (ESO)
• Using Aladin and Stellarium (Giulia Iafrate)

This part does not need to be long. Other partners interested in addressing WP5 are invited to sign-up here. Following the presentations, we should start working together (in pairs/triplets/etc) on laptops at a more technical/practical level.

Note: someone of the project Le stelle vanno a scuola (Stars go to school) will also be present at our meeting.This project led by Paolo Santin of the Trieste Observatory is based on a remotely controlled telescope made available for online observations to schools with kids ages 14-18 ( http://radiosun.ts.astro.it/scuoleremote/index.htm ).

-- MassimoRamella - 15 May 2008

"Südthüringer Tag der Astronomie" in Suhl (Germany), 6 December 2008

I meet Prof. Lotze from the departement of "Didactics of Astronomy" of the University of Jena on 5th Dec. 2008 and talked about WP5 and the use of VO-tools in school. He was very exicited and interested. I also gave him so info-material on EURO-VO and the use of VO-tools in school, which he presented at the "Südthüringer Tag der Astronomie" - a small event for teachers and the interested public.

-- FlorianFreistetter - 09 Dec 2008

AIDA in hi!tech

I was interviewed for an austrian magazine ("hi!tech - Das Innovationsmagazin") about VOs and AIDA. The article was published in this issue (01/09). I do not know, if this is relevante for any report... (they also gave a wrong link to the AIDA-homepage, i.e. they linked to a different AIDA-project that has nothing to do with VOs )

-- FlorianFreistetter - 27 Apr 2009

"Bundesweite Lehrerfortbildung Astronomie" in Jena (Germany), 25-27 June 2009

I participated in a conference for school teachers - „Lehrerfortbildung Astronomie“, held from June, 25 – 27 at the University of Jena (there is no conference homepage). The conference was organised by the departement of didactics of physics and astronomy (http://www.physik.uni-jena.de/~didaktik/). Almost 150 teachers from all over Germany attended. Besides normal lectures from professional astronomers, there is also a set of workshops. I was invited to give a workshop on „Arbeit mit virtuellen Observatorien im Schulunterricht (Using the VO in schools)“. About 35 teachers chose to attend my workshop and after a short introduction (What is the VO? etc) I introduced them to Aladin and worked through the use-cases we developed. In the end, I also showed the Stellarium and some tools from the GAVO-homepage. The teachers were very interested and I received three invitations to different schools directly after the workshop.

Here are some fotos:

AIDA at the AG-Meeting in Potsdam

From Sept. 21 - 25 there will be the meeting of the german "Astronomische Gesellschaft" (http://www.aip.de/AG2009/). There is a splinter meeting called "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy" where I will give present a poster on "Teaching with the Virtual Observatory" ( PosterPotsdamFreistetter.pdf). There also will be an information booth. - FlorianFreistetter - 30 Jun 2009

-- MassimoRamella - 08 May 2008