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FieldTripEarth
Saturday, January 16 10:15 – 11:20am
- FieldTripEarth – Mark MacAllister and Russ Williams
Description: Field Trip Earth (FTE) is the conservation education website operated by the North Carolina Zoological Society. FTE works closely with field-based wildlife researchers and provides their “raw materials”—field journals, photos, datasets, GIS maps, and so on—to K-12 teachers and students. The website is in use by classrooms in all 50 US states and 140 countries world-wide, and was recently designated as a “Landmark Website” by the American Association of School Librarians.
Discuss
FieldTripEarth – Project Overview
Project Description and Goals
FieldTripEarth (FTE), at http://www.fieldtripearth.org, is a conservation education website that makes it possible for students and teachers to interact with field-based wildlife researchers at work around the world. Developed by the North Carolina Zoological Society (Society), FTE is a vehicle for sharing the products of field research—narratives, photographs, video, datasets, maps, and so on—with classrooms and others interested in wildlife conservation. These “raw materials” provided by the researchers are designed to be easily integrated into day-to-day teaching activities across all of the academic disciplines. For example, many teachers use researchers’ field diaries to teach journaling and other literacy skills, while others use geographic location datasets generated by animal tracking projects to teach their students mapping concepts or coordinate systems.
Society’s fundamental purpose in designing and deploying FTE arises from its desire to serve the needs of a world-wide learning community by acting as a conservation and education organization, rather than as simply a facility exhibiting wildlife. Like all museums, the Society invests in public education programs that communicate the intrinsic value of its collection and that help visitors relate that collection to their own lives. And, like other museums, Society recognizes a need for programs that advocate on behalf of its collection. This advocacy is best advanced in a program that supports research and education about, and conservation of, the larger reservoir from which the collection is drawn. Ultimately, such attention should move visitors to develop the same sense of commitment to the field.
In addition to providing learning resources directly to classrooms, FTE includes a significant outreach component focused on Kindergartten-12th Grade students and teachers. FTE offers day-long training workshops with extensive follow-up requirements and delivers them to a wide variety of educators, in a wide variety of settings, across central North Carolina. The majority of these experiences are designed to familiarize teachers with the website and to help them create learning activities that they can then implement in their own classrooms.
The goals of the FTE program are:
• To increase students’ awareness of resource conservation issues generally, engender a positive environmental ethic among those students, and enhance their understanding of field research practices;
• To increase student awareness of the complexity of scientific, cultural, economic, ethical and historical factors that must be considered and prioritized to understand and find solutions to environmental problems;
• To increase teachers’ capacity to support student learning by providing high-quality instructional resources and opportunities for student interaction with researchers and other experts;
• To establish an easily-adapted model program to help other museums and zoos use the Internet to share the knowledge, skills, and experiences of their personnel with K-12 classrooms and others.
In order to accomplish these objectives, the program proceeds along three strands of activity: (1) technical development of the website itself; (2) teacher development to support capacity-building; and (3) content development to support teaching and learning. While each involves distinct individuals and processes, the lessons learned while executing these three strands frequently improve decisions made about the others—what we learn while developing a technical approach for FTE, for example, informs our decisions about designing the teacher workshops that are delivered in the program.
FTE’s Primary Audience: Serving the K-12 Classroom
It is instructive to examine data from FTE’s server logs, which track various statistics gathered from users interacting with the site. Unfortunately, beginning in mid-2009 and continuing through September 2009, the software provided by FTE’s hosting service to track website statistics has suffered intermittent failures, leading to data loss on several days each month; therefore, many of the figures cited below are significantly lower than what the actual figures should be. Nonetheless, these data reveal some important information about the FTE audience:
• It is evident that the site is used primarily by classrooms in the United States. Activity on the website is highest on weekdays from roughly early September until late May, with an obvious decline in activity for the months of June, July and August. Also, traffic on the site is heaviest during a typical school day (8:00 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. EST);
• The domain report shows significant visitation from the k12.us domain, which is used by many, though not all, public school districts. Many visitors also originate in the .edu domain, which identifies colleges and universities, and the .org domain, which is the realm of non-profit organizations, including many private schools. There is also some visitation from state and federal agencies, as well as from over 140 overseas domains;
• For the period January 1 – September 30, 2009, about 99,000 distinct hosts were noted;
• Narrative articles, photos and video account for more than half of the site data downloaded, with photos much more popular than video;
• An analysis of monthly site traffic shows continued growth on an annual basis, though truly accurate numbers are not available due to the statistics software failures noted above. In any event, it is practically impossible to ascribe traffic growth to any single factor, though it is safe to state that outreach efforts play a part, as does the likelihood that new teachers and other users simply discover the site over time and work to integrate it more frequently in their daily teaching and learning activities;
• The referrer report describes the route by which users navigated to the FieldTripEarth website. Not surprisingly, a substantial amount of traffic arrives by way of the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on), with a good deal of those users referred by the overseas versions of those tools. Many university aggregator sites, such as SunSite and LearnNorthCarolina, have pushed users to FTE. Other referrers include federal agencies (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service), media and television station websites, public school district sites, and university academic departments. Last—but certainly not least—comprehensive sites that serve the curriculum needs of K-12 public school teachers (KidsKonnect, WorldAtlas, etc.) are well represented in the referrers’ list.
FTE Honored by National Librarians’ Organization
In mid-July 2009, FTE learned that it had been designated by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) as one of the web’s 21 best sites for learning and curriculum development. These 21 sites, collectively known as Landmark Websites, are considered the “best of the best” by AASL. This one-time award places FTE in very elite company alongside the following web-based education projects:
University of Kansas: Advanced Learning Technologies
Learner.Org (Annenberg Media)
Apple Computer Learning Exchange
Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)
Discovery Channel Education
Edutopia
EduWeb
Global School
Google Earth
Library of Congress
MIT Open Courseware
Merlot
Moodle
NASA
Our Documents
PBS Teachers
Read, Write, Think
Smithsonian Education
Thinkfinity
WebQuest
According to AASL, “The task force worked very hard to target websites that support learner-centered, inquiry based curriculum. In the hands of knowledgeable educators, these innovative and versatile Web 2.0 tools and resources can be used to engage and motivate students in the learning process and to develop 21st century skills.” Also, according to AASL, FieldTripEarth and the other Landmark Websites for Teaching and Learning were recognized for their exemplary histories of authoritative, dynamic content and curricular relevance, and for their status as free sites that are user-friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover.
Conclusion
FieldTripEarth has benefited greatly from the support and generosity of a small number of government and private funders. The resources and experiences offered by FieldTripEarth have in turn benefited a wide variety of individuals and institutions. For the North Carolina Zoological Park and Society, FTE serves as an excellent vehicle for sharing important conservation education messages with a world-wide audience, and thus in meeting the outreach and education goals of both organizations.
Thousands of students in various settings have benefited from access to the site. Their teachers, especially those that have participated in the various FTE training workshops offered over the years, have learned to integrate conservation issues into their day-to-day activities. Many teachers have developed critical curriculum development skills that will inform their work as they design entirely new schools. And, finally, cooperating field researchers have gained additional tools for sharing information about their work and for advancing the interests of the species they are studying.
