Ocean Exploration through NOAA: collaborations for excellence in exploration and education

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\´s (NOAA\´s) Office of Ocean Exploration\´s mission is to lead NOAA ocean discovery by searching, investigating, and documenting unknown and poorly-known areas of the ocean using interdisciplinary exploration to advance and disseminate knowledge of the ocean environment and its physical, chemical, biological, and historical resources. Multidisciplinary expeditions to little-known or unknown ocean regions of the world ocean lie at the heart of accomplishing this mission and have taken scientists and educators to the Galapagos Rift, the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Alaska seamounts, and other areas as they sought to more completely know and understand our ocean. This presentation will focus on how NOAA is forming collaborations among scientists and educators to develop education and outreach resources tied to these expeditions, professional development for teachers to learn how to use these resources, and web-based daily logs from sea to supplement expedition-based lesson plans. This education program is directed at unfolding Key Objective 4 of the President\´s Panel on Ocean Exploration Report entitled Discovering Earth\´s Final Frontier: A U.S. Strategy for Ocean Exploration. This objective specifically calls for "reaching out in new ways to stakeholders to improve the literacy of learners with respect to ocean issues." A summary of the National Ocean Exploration Education Workshop findings will be presented, along with future programmatic priorities based on the workshop findings.