Welcome to the OEDSI Science Forum!

This forum is designed to allow you and your students to ask scientists who are either currently working or have worked in the scientific field questions that you might have after completing Step 2 of our program or as you continue through the program.

~You may ask more than one question and may ask questions to more than one scientist. However, due to the potential volume of questions from all the schools who are participating in the program we ask that you take care to make sure to read through all of the posts of each thread before you post a new question to make sure it has not already been asked.

~We also ask that you do not have individual students ask questions but come up with questions during a classroom discussion and assign one or two students at a time to be in charge of signing into the science forum to post your questions. You can assign students at different times throughout the program so that everyone gets a chance to be in charge of posting the questions but the volume is kept down to a minimum.

~ When you click on the ‘Science Forum’ link you will be asked to enter a login name and password. Your user login names and passwords will be the same as your username and password for both your teacher folder and your personal communication forum.

~ Before you ask a scientist questions on the Science Forum make sure that you go through the 'Meet the Scientists' page in our Science Corner so that you and your students can learn about each of the participating scientists and who to post their question(s) to. Your students can also write scientific bios and share them with other students and teachers through the sustainability forum by creating a “My Scientific Bio” thread for your school and posting them online.

How to Start Communicating with Scientists on the Science Forum!

After you have read through the scientists bios in the ‘Meet the Scientists’ section of our Science Corner and have come up with questions as a class to ask one of our scientists:

1. Click on this Science Forum link and login to the forum using your teacher folder login username and password. A main page will come up with different threads for each scientist. When you click on each scientist’s name their thread will open up and you will see that each scientist has entered a post with a brief introduction about themselves. If a student has posted a question it will appear under this initial introduction and the scientists reply will appear underneath his/her question. Make sure that you or your students go through each of the threads to see whether or not the questions that you are going to ask have already been asked. If they have you can come up with other questions; if not, then you can post your questions underneath the thread(s) of the scientist(s) that you have questions for.

2. Very Important: In order for a scientist to receive the question you want to post you must post the question(s) as a ‘reply’ under a post that was made by a scientist. If your question is similar to another question that the scientist has already answered click ‘reply’ underneath his/her response for that question. If it is a new question that is not similar to any other question that the scientist has answered please post your new question by clicking ‘reply’ underneath the scientist’s introductory post (the first one in the thread) You must follow these instructions if you want to get a response from the scientist. If you do not understand please write us and we will help you. Please make sure that you help your students when they are posting for the first time.

Reminder— When you write your questions remember to put a subject title in the subject box when you push reply-this should be a shortened version of the question so other students can see what your question is about.

3. You should receive an email notification when the scientist replies to each of your questions. However, it is a good idea to check the forum regularly after your students post to make sure they followed instructions correctly and to see whether or not a scientist has replied but for some reason you did not get an email notification. You can then have your students login and read the answers together or individually.