Nancy Trautmann

Professional Title
Director of Education, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Organization/Institution
About Me (Bio)
As Director of Education at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Nancy Trautmann leads a team that creates educational resources and experiences for people of all ages, focusing on birds, biodiversity, and conservation. Drawing on the Lab’s extensive web resources and citizen science opportunities, these efforts aim to spark curiosity, build science skills, and inspire conservation action among diverse groups within the U.S. and abroad. Trautmann holds a joint appointment between the Lab and Cornell’s Department of Natural Resources. Her research focuses on effective use of technology to support learning. Currently she is investigating the effectiveness of sustained professional development in enabling secondary teachers to facilitate student investigations and projects in which students use geospatial and communication technologies to address biodiversity conservation issues in their home communities and abroad.
Cornell University
10/01/2007

This project is developing, piloting, and implementing online professional development in support of inquiry, focusing on facilitation of student research. The goal is to determine what types of Web-based experiences and resources most effectively support middle school teachers in overcoming the substantial hurdles inherent in enabling students to design and conduct their own scientific experiments. The project creates and tests a series of Web-based professional development experiences for 7th and 8th grade teachers.