My first goal for my students, above any academic concerns, is to ensure that they are safe and healthy. Based on experience with my child at home, a wide range of studies, and the testimonials of my students' parents, I know that the amount of screen time students typically engage in these days is a cause for concern. As we move toward increasing use of screen based technologies both at home and at school, this problem has often troubled me. The amount of time children spend outdoors has been decreasing proportionally to the amount of time they spend indoors consuming one form of media or another. I know that children love video games, YouTube Videos, Tic Tok, and social media. They familiar with and skilled at using these forms of technology. I also know that they love playing and learning outdoors when they are given access or encouraged to get out of their homes or classrooms. I've seen the power of outdoor education through the various field trips and overnight adventures our school offers to children. These experiences, in my opinion, are too limited.
My big question has been how to leverage students' familiarity and interest in technology in order to get them more in touch with outdoor environments. I've discovered that it can be done! Through an outdoor photography homework model, where students use handheld devices to capture images of plants and animals, and identify them using apps such as iNaturalist or Seek, students can be prompted to go outdoors on a much more frequent basis. This activity is linked to the classroom where kids share and present their photos with the class and larger audiences. The transliteracy skills students learn through this kind of project empowers them to be effective communicators in the 21st Century. Empowering my students, after looking after their health, has been my other big interest as an educator. In the future I plan to continue to explore this idea by linking our newly adopted science curriculum with outdoor photography extensions. This will help students to fulfill the NGSS goal of students "doing" science rather than passively learning about it in class. I also hope that it will increase their ability to perform the NGSS practice of obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information. It would be great to collect end products to share with other teachers. It would also be great to develop a teacher training to show step by step how to put into action a outdoor photography homework "flipped" science unit. It would be great to have data to show teachers and parents how this kind of activity can lead to students spending more quality and healthy time outdoors. It would be great to be able to show with data how it increased parent involvement with students. I could also share these results on a much larger scale if I share these experiences on social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram.
3 Comments
Kirsten
6/8/2020 05:01:21 pm
I think your research project is awesome! It is so hard to balance enough technology in the classroom, especially for our young kids. They need to learn these skills however it is easy to stick them on a screen and forget about their other needs. I think it is great how you are incorporating the outdoors with your students learning!
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Melissa
6/8/2020 06:17:04 pm
Jeremy,
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Jeremy
6/10/2020 08:41:07 am
Thanks, colleagues, for the comments. Yes, finding the balance between screens and outdoor learning is an important practice. We get so tied up in getting CAASPP standards into our kids' heads that we tend to forget about "the whole child". As teachers, we get recognized primarily for our students' performance on these tests, but not for how much healthy outdoor learning we provide. It'll be interesting to see if this shifts in the future as our awareness about the benefits out outdoor learning grows.
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AuthorJeremy Smith teaches third grade at Calistoga Elementary School. Archives
July 2020
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