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Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, in collaboration with the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP), has hosted a number of teacher workshops exploring a broad range of science teaching strategies and technology. Participants included STEP students and faculty, STEP graduates now teaching in local schools, and STEP collaborating teachers. 
Jasper Ridge staff and docents Margaret Krebs, Monya Baker, and Bill Gomez worked together with workshop participants to explore and develop effective classroom and field curriculum. Educational opportunities have evolved over the past few years at the Preserve in response to the increased demand across grade levels for environmental education and ecology classes. Teaching teachers is a positive and efficient way to reach large numbers of students in the community without excessively increasing traffic and impact at the Preserve. Through this kind of outreach to educators we are able to share ecology teaching models with a diverse audience of teachers and their students in many local schools.
Probeware software by Vernier used with laptops enables teachers and students to investigate a variety of topics that are not easily understood through direct observation. This kind of technology also enables classes to replicate in their own locations certain data that are collected at the Preserve.
Several Bay Area high schools will be using soil temperature probes to collect data on their campuses, which they can then compare with data from other schools. Finally, the students will be able to access electronically, soil temperature data from the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment (JRGCE) to add to their comparative analysis. (The JRGCE examines the response of California grassland to four components of global change: elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, elevated temperature, altered precipitation, and increased nitrogen deposition.) 
Collaborations of this kind accomplish many goals in the science classroom. Students engage in meaningful work and learn first hand how to collect and analyze data. Utilizing internet technology, students can compare and interpret their data with that of other schools and even the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment.
Prior to visiting the JRGCE site, the teachers worked together in a classroom-based brainstorming session where they were asked to design a global climate change experiment. Bill Gomez led the group through the process of defining their scientific questions about climate change, what type of data they would need to collect, and how they would go about collecting and analyzing their data. After developing a rough plan for their mock experiment, the group was given an in depth explanation of the global change experiment and the kinds of questions and research that are currently being investigated. For more information about the Stanford Teacher Education Program, visit: http://suse-step.stanford.edu/index.htm For more information about the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment, visit: globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/JRGCE/home.html For more information about Vernier software and technology for math and science educators, visit: www.vernier.com/ |
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