Real-world learning in a virtual environment

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For many students, school doesn’t seem to have much to do with the real world. Science, social studies, and mathematics can be just words on a page, with little connection to their own lives. But what if students — even as young as middle-school age — could work with real-world researchers, following their work and learning how it relates to their own lives?

Darlene Ryan, North Carolina’s 1999 Technology and Learning Teacher of the Year, has spent the past few years answering that question. Working with the North Carolina Zoological Park, she has been able to connect her students with wildlife researchers via the Internet. Her school, Chatham County’s Perry Harrison School, also received a Business Week Award last spring for its use of technology for learning. By using technology to bring her students into real-world projects — in this case, wildlife conservation — Ryan has been able to make the curriculum come alive. Her students start to take ownership of their learning, and she finds that she learns as much as they do.

"The students were so involved in what they were doing and had such ownership in the project, they felt like professionals. That was the best part, that they took ownership of their learning."

Darlene Ryan’s forays into wildlife research began modestly enough, with a Chatham County staff development initiative designed to encourage teachers to use technology in their classrooms. As part of a mentoring program, experienced teachers observed the classrooms of technology novices and offered advice on how they could integrate new technology resources into their teaching.

That first group of teachers then brainstormed on how to go beyond those early efforts. They realized that if they could include public resources — like the North Carolina Zoo, the Museum of History, the Museum of Life and Science, and so on — they could expand both the educational opportunities of their students and the abilities of those institutions to reach the public. They also knew that the zoo’s staff was looking for ways to encourage teachers to use the zoo as an educational resource.

As it happened, Dr. Mike Loomis, a veterinarian at the N.C. Zoo, was planning a trip to Africa to help the World Wildlife Fund track elephants. WWF wanted to know more about the movements of elephants so that they could help craft a conservation plan that would allow humans and elephants to coexist. Loomis’s job would be to place radio collars on elephants so that they could be tracked by ground receivers and satellites. Ryan mentioned to the zoo staff that seventh-grade social studies, which she was then teaching, covered Africa, and that a Web site providing lesson plans and interactive activities would let students follow his work as part of their social studies curriculum.

Working with zoo staff, a group of Chatham County educators spent the next two months brainstorming and writing lesson plans to incorporate Dr. Loomis’s work into the seventh-grade curriculum. They produced more than two dozen lesson plans, covering not only social studies but language arts, mathematics, science, arts, healthful living, and computer education. The plans were then organized into five interdisciplinary units on broad topics such as trip planning, the history and culture of Cameroon, and endangered species. The activities required students to participate actively in their learning by manipulating data, drawing conclusions, and completing other critical thinking tasks.

The Web site also provided ways for students to communicate with Dr. Loomis while he was in Africa; the veterinarian posted journal entries to the site and was available for questions via email. As the culmination of their study, students would complete Elephant Management Plans, group projects that required students to draw on what they had learned to develop written, comprehensive plans for ensuring the continued survival of elephants in Cameroon.

Perhaps the most important thing the educators did to get students excited about what they were learning was to tie the activities not only to the state curriculum but to the interests of seventh-graders. Focusing such a large block of time — two months in the spring of 1999 — on a real-world issue was a start. "I think students, particularly middle-school students, want to be involved in what’s going on around them," says Ryan. "They’re social beings by that point."

Ryan had her students track the elephants themselves using the data provided on the Web site and analyze that data based on what they had learned about elephants and about the people of Cameroon. For comparison, they made and wore "fake radio collars" to track their own movements, then compared the reasons for their own "migration" with those of the elephants.

Interacting directly with researchers and other experts also helped draw students into their work. "My students knew Dr. Loomis like he was their teacher," she says. "We went to the zoo twice, and he came here once. But they talked so much by email and through his journals and forums that he was a real person to them — which is different from reading about scientists in a book." The students began to see themselves as direct participants in the conservation project. "When Dr. Loomis came here they acted like they were professionals," she adds, "and they treated him as a professional."

On one occasion, the tranquilizer the researchers used on an elephant failed, and the elephant disappeared into the woods. Without proper monitoring, there was a chance the elephant could die. "The students were in a panic over why it didn’t work," Ryan recalls. They spent the day brainstorming possibilities — Had the tranquilizer dart been on the shelf too long? Did the pellet not insert itself correctly? When Loomis called by satellite phone, the students learned that even scientists don’t always have the answers. The elephant had been seen later, so they knew it had lived, but they never learned why the tranquilizer failed. In fact, the scientists had spent the evening brainstorming just as the students had. When they learned that, the students felt "really important — really like scientists."

When the students wrote their conservation plans, they showed not only how much they had learned but how seriously they took their work. Working in groups, they wrote lengthy documents analyzing what should be done to protect elephants. When they were finished, they sent the plans to the World Wildlife Fund — another incentive for the students to take their work seriously. "Their ideas were sometimes very far-fetched," Ryan says, recalling one student’s suggestion that poachers be shot on sight. "But others of them were more realistic."

All of them, though, considered the project to be much more than just a school assignment. Ryan had only four computers in her classroom last year, plus two more in the classroom of language arts teacher Kim Isenhour, who collaborated with her to teach the unit. "We had to farm students out everywhere to type, to research," Ryan recalls. "I had students going to the kindergarten classroom to type, to the third-grade classroom.… We never had any discipline problems. The teachers kept saying, ‘What have you done?’"

"They were so involved in what they were doing and had such ownership in the project, they felt like professionals.… They would go in to the other classrooms and sit down and do their work at the computers, and when the little kids would watch them type and research, they would share their information with them and tell them about middle school.

"It was like they were in a transformation from middle school students, which you typically think of as wild and unruly, to young adult professionals. That was the best part, that they took ownership of their learning. They were so excited about what they were doing that we the teachers were just in the background, helping them to get it done."

Students and teachers alike learned so much from The Elephants of Cameroon that the N. C. Zoo, Ryan, and her colleagues collaborated on a second Web site for 1999-2000, Red Wolves of Alligator River. This project is closer to home, in the Alligator River area of Albemarle Sound. The zoo is working to reintroduce red wolves into the wild, and students can participate via the Web site.

This time, the project is geared primarily toward eighth-graders, in part because the eighth-grade social studies curriculum covers North Carolina. The lesson plans and activities on the site, however, cover grades K-8. "We wanted to give more teachers the opportunity to share in the experiences we had had," Ryan says. Given the choice of teaching seventh or eighth grade this year, she chose eighth so she could participate in the new project while teaching both science and social studies. She has continued her collaboration with Kim Isenhour to bring in language arts.

As they did last year, her students — most of whom participated in the elephant project — have treated their work as a professional activity. They have again used email to talk with the experts, the red wolf keepers at the zoo and the scientists at Alligator River. The classes spent the fall learning about different species of wolves, their environments, and the problems each has faced when reintroduced into the wild. They also studied the roles of wolves in literature and culture, reading fairy tales involving wolves and comparing the portrayals of them as aggressors to their real role in nature. "We’ve been weaving red wolves into everything we’re doing!" Ryan says, laughing. By looking at wolves from the perspectives of several different disciplines, the students have acquired an appreciation of the issues surrounding the wolf’s reintroduction into areas inhabited by humans.

As their culminating project, the students are creating a survey to see how people would feel if wolves were reintroduced into the area around Jordan Lake in Chatham County. The students spent a day discussing how to distribute the survey — could they, logistically, distribute it to enough people to get reliable data? "They started out with the grandiose idea of putting it in the newspaper, putting it in the mail," Ryan says, "and then all the dollar signs started popping up." They eventually decided to ask all the students in the school to take the survey home to their parents, and arranged for students at other local schools to do the same.

When they compile the results of the survey, the students will pair off to write magazine articles in Kim Isenhour’s language arts classroom. Hopefully, Ryan says, they will be able to submit the articles for publication.

This real-world learning would not have been possible without the Internet, Ryan points out. "We don’t have the resources in our media center that our students have gotten from these Web sites. We don’t have the financial resources to have speakers in of the caliber of Mike Loomis.… For my students to be able to go online and speak to researchers opens a whole new world for them."

Access to online resources, she adds, has also leveled the playing field for students. Before computers, "when you gave them a project to do, you sent them home to do it. When I can provide the resources via the Internet, you don’t have the child who goes home and has no books, no magazines, no newspapers because there’s no money… and comes back feeling ashamed. None of my students feel like they aren’t capable." Using computers for their work also contributes to the students’ sense that they are participating in a real-world project. "They all know that to type it… makes it look more professional. They all know that the best and most recent research now is on the Web. The technology makes it real," she says. "It brings the world back to them."

For teachers interested in doing similar technology-rich project with their students, Ryan has one piece of advice: start small. "The management of all we did last year could be quite scary" to a teacher trying it for the first time, she says. "Try a small activity, see what the students gain from it, and expand it a bit the following year based on your reflection."

But, she is quick to point out, the results are worth the extra work — for teacher as well as students. "The Internet opens doors for all levels of students," she says, "and it teaches me, as I watch them grow and learn. I get my best ideas from them. They come up with wonderful things. And they understand that even at my old age" — she laughs — "I still enjoy learning with them."