Misty and Me
It is true, blogs are not my favorite thing to do in a class, because teachers want educational things so, that's what students put into them. That is just wrong, blogs can educate but they don't have to be dull, dry, and hard to swallow. I am creating this blog to educate but more importantly to share my joy. This week I attended one of the many programs the Alabama Wildlife Federation (AWF) offers to schools and the general public. AWF certifies schools' outdoor classrooms and provides the Huntsville Botanical Garden with some good educational tools. You ask, what is an outdoor classroom, it is an area build outdoors that is used for educational purposes. It can take many forms and include something as simple as a bunch of vegetables growing boxes or host plants and nectar plants for butterflies, to large areas that includes a pond or lake that will support an entire eco- system. The goal of an outdoor classroom is to link all subjects to the outdoors. Kindergarteners can go out an count flowers for math, high school students can conduct biology experiments on water and soil, and all grades can use it to study weather. The uses for an outdoor classroom is only limited by imagination or the teacher who is not willing to look beyond the smart boards at the front of the class. For ED 308 we have to build a curriculum on any subject we want and mine is to have a high school environmental science class build for an elementary school over the course of two years. So now why this is worth blogging about.
While at the training I talked with the people that do the support and certifying of outdoor classrooms and found out what I thought was going to be tough, became easy. April gave me enough information to get me to about week 10 on my curriculum and this week I'm going to her Huntsville office to get information on what I would need to have my students accomplish until the project was completed (if the schools were actual schools). I only need to do 15 weeks for this assignments but I'm excited because I'll have all the information I need and if I ever create my own school (which I would love to do), I'll be able to build an outdoor classroom at my school. April told me, I can have the students, parents, teachers, everyone that wants to help us be a part of the project and I don't have to work with contractors if I don't want to. I do want to build contractors into my curriculum but only because I want the students to learn how to coordinate with organizations outside the academia world, but it doesn't have to be as much as I feared it may be. That is reason one for this blog.
Reason two for this blog is because Dr. Gale helped my figure out how to start an assignment I don't want to do but need to, in order to complete this class. The requirement is valid because the purpose of this entire technology education minor is to learn how to teach using technology but I don't want to teach online classes. Of course once I got the site set-up it put me in a happy mood and then I realized how useful the Learning Management Site would be, even for a live class since I did that my entire time I was at ASU. That also made me happy.
But the thing that made me the happiest is where and what Misty and I were doing on the muddy river. We attended the session that covered ways to use outdoor water for education. It had poured rain the night before so, the river was flowing fast and had a ton of sand and mud on top. The requirement was to take that big net, scoop a bunch of the bottom of the river into it and see what you get. Misty stayed on the bank holding one end and I waded out into the water and scooped the "stuff" into the net. We found all kinds of life forms. It was worth getting my jeans wet to my knees. It put me in such a good mood, the rest of my day had no chance of being anything but perfect. Who wouldn't want to go out, into a cold rushing stream, early in the morning, looking for living things.
Three great things happen all in the same day, who wouldn't want to blog.
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