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Learning and Teaching Real-World Science with Virtual Resources
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| Coming Up Soon - Winter 2008! |
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 Developed for classroom use
Grade Levels: 6 -12
Aligned with the National Technology standards (NETS) & NSES
Based on previous EstuaryLive expeditions
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News! Illustrate concepts about estuaries by using videos from a brand NEW video collection, available in the winter of 2008.
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 | | Today’s students learn with dynamic text, sounds, and images that race across screens of light. They are creators of media who publish their lives and opinions to MySpace, Blogger, and YouTube for all the world to see – and yet we as educators still do not know them. Generation Y students (ages 13 to 31) bring interests, abilities, and needs we do not yet understand (Spires, 2008) – and new challenges for us as educators to not only learn to teach in new ways with new technologies but to learn to learn in these new ways with new technologies ourselves.
In order to better respond to the needs of this wired generation, and support teachers in adopting new technologies, the NERRS is taking a a new approach. We will repurpose ten years of archived EstuaryLive live, real-time, online expeditions into interactive digital learning objects that teachers and students can use to support learning about different concepts addressed in the Estuaries 101 curriculum and additional National Science, state, and local standards. As hour-long Web programs that lack the appeal of live, real-time events, these resources offer limited educational value. But as single-concept, phenomenon or process-specific digital learning objects, these video resources have the potential to attract, engage, and inspire young Generation Y students.
COMING SOON! - SciVi Field Trips: Learning and Teaching Real-World Science with Virtual Resources
From its humble beginnings, EstuaryLive has evolved under NOAA’s sponsorship to bring students to almost twenty estuaries on the east, west, and gulf coasts of the United States. It’s this wealth of documentary estuarine resources that we wish to both preserve as a collection but also to repurpose as digital learning objects. We have, thus, chosen to use and provide educators with a model for including participatory Web 2.0 tools for encouraging creative and innovative thinking in science learning and we call these Science Virtual Field Trips or SciVi Field Trips. Five sample SciVi Field Trips will be developed and published on the Web using Google Sites and Google Docs so that teachers can see how a “backpack” (in problem based learning (PBL) usually called a “briefcase”) containing all the assignments, resources, management forms, and assessment tools looks like on the Web.SciVi Field Trips (Science Virtual" can be abbreviated "SciVi" which in a surprisingly meaningful coincidence is derived from the Latin word for science and means “I knew”).
SciVi Field Trips are more than the typical virtual field trips with themed or topical links. Based on the best of current thinking on how to develop creativity, SciVi Field Trips use video learning objects mined from archives of NOAA’s popular live, online EstuaryLIVE expeditions. These video learning objects are integrated in learning experiences designed to engage students in creative/innovative thinking – which is receiving increasing attention as a vital 21st century skill. The design of these learning experiences is based on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy and Daniel Pink’s important book, A Whole, New Mind.
In this model, the Estuaries 101 curricular goals and National Technology standards (NETS) are addressed in activities that lead students to view video learning objects both critically and creatively and then use Web 2.0 applications to share their thinking with their classmates and the world.
Borrowing from Julius Caesar, 21st century students who learn with SciVi Field Trips can say: “I came, I saw, I created . . . and, now I know." |
Last Updated on: 07-13-2008
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