Project Proposal

C&I 335

Summer 1998

Jan Hari

8th Science Teacher

Science Coordinator

Urbana Middle School/District #116

Urbana, Illinois

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CTER Proposal

UMS Water Quality

The following work is a collaborative work by Sue Bogren, Kevin Erlinger, Jan Hari, and Pam VanWalleghen:

Teachers are always striving to make education more meaningful for their students.

Giving students real situations in which they have ownership is key to reaching

this goal. Our group is planning to develop a water quality unit that we believe will

excite students by giving them experiences in real life problem solving.

Ultimately, we would like to develop a cross curricular unit to be implemented in

the middle school team teaching format. This summer, however, we will focus on

the science and technology ends of this project.

 

The basic premise of this activity is that students will visit local streams to collect

water samples for chemical analysis, collect site information such as water

temperature and flow rate, collect GPS referenced longitude and latitude readings,

and collect benthic macroorganisms for quality monitoring. This will be done at

various locations along the stream and at various times in the year. Results will be

compiled and posted on the web as well as on maps created in GIS based software.

 

To accomplish this project we will break it into the following components:

background activities, field/lab activities, and analysis and presentation activities. In

the background activities we will develop lessons to teach students about mapping,

the water cycle, water analysis techniques, benthic macroorganisms, and computer

tools. The computer tools will include using spreadsheets for recording information

and generating graphs, writing basic HTML, using peripherals such digital cameras,

flexcams, and CBL probes, and using MapIT! (a Java based mapping program) and

GPS units to create maps.

 

The field and lab activities will be centered around the collection and analysis of the

water and organisms collected. We will investigate which chemical tests the

students will run but will definitely include pH, nitrate/nitrite, hardness, and

alkalinity. The final lessons to be developed will be compiling the results into HTML

documents, creating GIS referenced maps with our point data, and publishing the

information on the web.

 

We will also investigate activities and assignments that have the students draw conclusions

of the results collected. In order to achieve our goals, we will divide the project into tasks

that will be accomplished by the following people: Pam Van Walleghen will develop training

materials for the computer tools, Kevin Erlinger and Pam will develop the training

materials and lessons using MapIT! and train Jan Hari and Sue Bogren on MapIT!,

Jan, Sue and Kevin will develop the science background and field activities, and Jan

and Sue will develop a unit matrix to design learning activities that meet a wide

range of learner needs and abilities.

 

Kevin and I teach over 80% of the 8th grade science students. We strive to make sure that

all students have a similar experience in their science courses. My students and I will be

collecting the same samples, doing the same tests, and reporting the same information,

creating the same maps, compiling the results into HTML and publishing the information

on the Web as described above. One difference will be that Kevin's students will focus on

publishing the water test results from both teams and my students will focus on publishing

pictures of the benthic macroorganisms that both teams find. In addition, I will be

responsible for creating science and field background activities with the technology that we

want them to learn imbedded in the activity such as learning how to organize, measure, and

collect data, and the techniques to collect information from a stream to get a good sample.

Although the group has discussed what we want all students to be able to do and we are

working together to create the classroom training materials, Sue and I will be working on

a unit matrix that gives students a wide variety of additional learning choices. The matrix is

based on the John Samara model with activities arranged from simple to abstract to meet the

needs and interests of the learner and to allow for a variety of products to illustrate the

knowledge gained.

 

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