Photo by Cris Crissman

The educational coordinator for the North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve is Susan Lovelace. I asked Susan about her motivation for creating "live" virtual estuary field trips. 

Professionally, it gives people a vision of what an estuary is so that when they hear things on the news that relates to fishery issues, to coastal issues, they will have a mental picture of where an estuary is and all the different things that interact to make it work. I guess that's one of the best things I learned in teacher educationóif you don't have an idea of what something is then it's important to see and have a feel for it. It's like when we go out to the marsh pond, and I have some kids over there in person. I have them look at it and I say, "Now close your eyes and see this picture in your mind so that when someone says estuary this is what I want you to know." It's making mental notes. That's what I'm trying to achieve with this professionally. Personally, I want kids to look beyond just where they live and see the big picture and how everything fits together.

In a lot of different waysóI hate to say this but start with moneyówe can reach a much larger audience with a lot less staff. Although this does cost money, it doesn't begin to cost the staff it would take us for these same functions for a lot of people. Also, travel Ö we're finding that it's getting hard for kids to travel places. This is a way, though it's not as good as being there, I do think it's the next best thing. I think the fact that it's interactive makes a tremendous difference. We can create a beautiful video that would look a lot better than the video we're sending out. But this way, the students can ask questions and they can hear other people's questions and see and hear what we find. When it's off the cuff, I think it can make more of an impression.

Website for teachers and students who take the EstuaryLIVE trip
 
 

Photo by Cris Crissman
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

"We have proven that this grassroots internet field trip can be done. Now the larger question echoes Caroline's own: 'Is this really worth doing?'"
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

My goal as a teacher educator is to learn how EstuaryLIVE and similar projects can bring a new vitality to the classroom. In the first story, a story from my own teaching experience, I describe how I used the EstuaryLIVE project as a catalyst for encouraging more active and project-based learning in my Reading in the Content Areas course. In the second story, we hear from a creative sixth grade middle school team and their enterprising technology specialist. 
 

EstuaryLIVE In Teacher Education

Opportunistic teacher that I am, EstuaryLIVE to me represented a unique way to have my Reading in the Content Area students experience a real-world application of a unit that integrated thinking-skill development and content area instruction. That's what Reading in the Content Areas or actually Literacy in the Content Areas means to meómaking the most of language-mediated opportunities to learn to think while also developing subject matter understanding, both conceptual and procedural. Often the strategies that provide support for the learner as s/he attempts to use text to learn new content or skills are referred to as "scaffolded reading strategies" (Vacca & Vacca, 1999). 

Thinking-skill development, content area instruction, plus technologyóthis project had it all! Even more important than the opportunity to model for my students what this unit represented, these soon-to-be-teachers themselves would experience Literacy in the Content Area strategies and technology in their own learning. After years of working with inservice teachers, I was convinced that such a constructivist approach (more on this theory in Lesson #4) is by far the most successful in helping teachers begin to control their own professional development. And so I set about developing an interdisciplinary unit for my preservice teachers that would engage them in learning about the estuary while they applied the strategies they were learning for scaffolding instruction. The culminating project would be several website resources that they would develop for teachers and students who were participating in the EstuaryLive event. 

I began the estuary unit with a favorite scaffolded reading strategy, a predictive one called "Possible Sentences" (Vacca & Vacca, 1999). The students were asked to make connections among the ten words I had written on a chart (words like estuary, spartina, detritus, nutrea, horse, turbidity, salinity) and create sentences in which they connected at least three. This strategy works like a charm and in no time you have a fairly good assessment of the students' prior knowledge of estuaries and you have successfully piqued their interest. I then showed just the first five or so minutes of the "Waters of Life" videoójust enough so they could begin to understand what an estuary is and what these words meant in this context. This introduction flowed naturally into the next scaffolding reading strategy, Donna Ogle's KWL or "What do you Know?" "What do you Want to know?" (or sometimes "What do you wonder?") and "What did you Learn?" Because I like to stress the practical application of knowledge from the very beginning, I have added "CD" for "Can Do." "What can you do with what you learned?" After we listed everything that we knew about the estuary (which was not a lot), we created a graphic organizer or map on which we represented the concepts/information and the connections among them. What we knew could clearly be chunked as topics and small research groups formed to explore their topics and guiding questions for inquiry. Topics included the adaptability of the plants and animals of the estuary, protecting the estuary, the cultural significance of the estuary, etc. Each group researched their topic on the web and then created a PowerPoint presentation for the class to share what they had learned. 
 
 

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