How does nature education fit into school 2.0? I just attended a 2-day workshop put on by our new Wildcat Glades Audobon and Conservation Center. The center won’t be done until next week, but I can already tell that it has great potential. I tried recording a couple of talks and interviewed the Education Director there. I will try to putting them up soon for my first podcast.
Now back to the question. The center does incorporate some green technology like a special materials on the roof so they can grow native plants there. It will also help moderate the building temperatures and control rain runoff. The will also include a rain garden and the runoff from the roof will collect in a cistern for watering. Chris, the education director, said that incorporating green technology was more expensive, but will result in 40% annual energy savings. If we apply Moore’s law to green technology, we can expect to reduce or eliminate the cost difference. He has also received special permission to make the center’s future web site to be interactive. Not only will it have activities, games, and lesson plans, but he wants schools to be able to enter data they gather from their trip to the center into a cumulative database. That Web 2.0 database is a good beginning.
However, School 2.0 is not just about the technology, it is about what the student do. During our workshop we used nets, observed plant and insects, and recorded them in our experience journals we made. We waded in the Shoal Creek and used nets to catch insects and animals. By observing carefully and identifying the life forms we found, we could get an idea about of the water quality of the stream. It was fun to wade in the water and walk the trail, but I was fascinated at the diversity of life that can we could discover just by poking and prodding into hiding places. My first thought when we found it was, what is it? Then I wondered what does its presence there mean? Is it good, or bad, or typical that it is there? Then I wondered why it was there? Those same questions kept popping into my mind every time we would discover something new. Kids would ask the same questions. Should I answer them, when they look at me, expecting the right answer? The answer is the difference between School 1.0 and School 2.0. School 2.0 is about investigation and connecting what they find with the student’s life. School 2.0 is not about the technology, its about the kind of learning that takes place.
I still had a great time learning with technology I took along with me. I had never been so engaged deciding when to take pictures and when not to. I decided that I would take picture for 3 purposes. I would use some in my classroom to teach about plants and animals. I would upload some to Flikr to share pictures of the new conservation center and the one of the few Chert Glades left in the world. I would try to include some in this blog entry and the future podcast entry (we’ll have to see whether that works). I was also very aware of the sounds around me, so I could decided whether or not to record the sound with my digital recorder. It wasn’t necessarily the technology that had me so aware and engaged in the activity, it was the potential pictures and sounds that I could record with it and later use.
At first glance, School 2.0 might seem to be the antithesis of nature education, but this ecology workshop spurred me to think on a deeper level about what schools in the 21st century should look like.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
; ?>/widget_images/flickr.png)
Flickr/jsigler; ?>/widget_images/twitter.png)
Twitter/jsigler; ?>/widget_images/youtube.png)
YouTube/jsigler; ?>/widget_images/delicious.png)
Del.icio.us/jsigler; ?>/widget_images/gmail.png)
GMail/James Sigler; ?>/widget_images/blog.png)
Blog/James Sigler
Lunarpages web hosting