FREDERICKTOWN — Temperature, wind speed, wind chill, dew point, rainfall, humidity and the percentage of outside light are among the real-world, real-time weather data available to Fredericktown teachers and students through the district’s new WeatherBug system.
A wealth of data is transmitted hourly from sensors on the roof of the new building to monitors located in the fourth-grade classroom of teacher Susan Link. Because the system is networked, all teachers in the building can access up to four months of data from their classroom computers.
“It’s a wonderful system,” said Link. “What is really nice is, K through 12, there are some kind of science standards that weather touches. Whether it’s simply weather, or mapping or graphing of data of some kind or using technology, it just covers a world of science standards. We can also relate it to math and geography. That’s what’s really cool about it.
“It’s just so exciting. The potential for what we can do with the data is unlimited, and it’s our data. It’s not weather from Mansfield or Columbus. We can print graphs and look at trends and make weather predictions. We want to get to the point where we could have a child being the meteorologist of the day and giving a weather report on morning announcements.”
Link wrote several grant applications to acquire the money to purchase the WeatherBug system and its associated WeatherBug Achieve software that fosters interactive learning using the data. The site also includes lessons on weather-related topics such as weather folklore, like how woolly caterpillars have been used to predict the severity of winter weather.
WeatherBug also links to a school network.
“What’s really cool is,” Link said, “we can go online and with WeatherBug Achieve we can click on Dan Emmett’s data or Caledonia’s data and we can compare our data to theirs. There are thousands of WeatherBug sites around the country, and then there are WeatherBug sites in Europe. So we can get data from there as well. We’re piped into WBNS-TV so when Channel 10 does their weather, often Fredericktown comes up with other sites.
“And it’s forever. Once we got the grant, that paid for all the equipment. The software is forever. We don’t have to do anything to renew it.”
