| "If the data presented is from a real sanctuary, it becomes even more meaningful." | |
| Laura Francis, Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary |
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Geographic information systems (GIS) have proven their value to coastal resource managers who rely on this mapping technology to aid in planning and decision making. Environmental educators are now helping teachers use GIS in the classroom to capture the interest of students as they learn about coastal and ocean sciences.
"GIS is a great tool to teach science," says Laura Francis, education coordinator at Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary in California. "If the data presented is from a real sanctuary, it becomes even more meaningful."
Channel Islands is helping pioneer efforts to bring GIS into science classrooms around the country. The sanctuary's pilot effort, Mapping an Ocean Sanctuary, provides high school teachers with standards-based lesson plans using Channel Islands' GIS data. The programming has evolved into other projects and expanded to include other national marine sanctuaries.
In 2000, Channel Islands partnered with the Center for Image Processing in Education to develop the Mapping an Ocean Sanctuary curriculum—a set of six lessons that provide students with actual case studies, data, and images from the Channel Islands.
As students work through the lessons, they also learn GIS analysis techniques that can be used to customize the lessons, or to develop new projects. They also collect their own information and add it to an existing ArcView GIS.
Evaluations of Mapping an Ocean Sanctuary expanded the sanctuary's GIS offerings to include the Ocean Explorers project.
"We did a follow-up with teachers, and some of them were struggling to implement it," explains Francis. Ocean Explorers helps teachers overcome barriers to using GIS in the classroom.
Sixty teachers from throughout California are currently in the second year of the intensive three-year Ocean Explorers program. Teachers participating in the project receive mentoring, software, equipment, funding, and training.
"They learn GIS inside and out," and as a result can "develop their own lessons and become mentor teachers for others in the district and area," Francis says.
Another offshoot is Exploring Data with GIS to Experience Sanctuaries, or EDGES. Again collaborating with the Center for Image Processing in Education, developers created the EDGES curriculum using GIS data, including satellite and buoy data, from Channel Islands, Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in Massachusetts, Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary in Georgia, and Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in Florida.
The EDGES curriculum is now being pilot tested at each of the sanctuaries.
Expanding the curriculum to other sanctuaries and other parts of the country provides students with data that are more relevant to their own regions, notes Cathy Sakas, education coordinator for Gray's Reef. "It helps bring it home a little bit."
Sakas adds, "What we are trying to accomplish is an ocean-literate society. Any way, shape, or form that we can get ocean science into the schools, we'll do it. This is a golden opportunity."
For more information about Mapping an Ocean Sanctuary, point your browser to www.evisual.org/www/Instr/MOS.html, or http://channelislands.noaa.gov/edu/edu_act1.html. For more information about either Mapping an Ocean Sanctuary or EDGES, contact Laura Francis at (805) 884-1463, or Laura.Francis@noaa.gov, or Jenny Brady, director of GIS education at the Center for Image Processing in Education, at (800) 322-9884, ext. 253, or jennyb@evisual.org. For more information on EDGES, contact Cathy Sakas at (912) 598-2417, or Cathy.Sakas@noaa.gov.
