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May 30, 2007

Resources for Educators

Recently I've gotten two questions from educators who would like to get involved with citizen science projects or environmental web sites. I thought I'd post them here and ask for recommendations from readers.

The first question comes from Christopher:

I am an environmental educator in Seattle, WA, and I am very interested in starting a citizen science program with an elementary school, mainly with a group of 5th graders. How do I go about doing this? Do I just contact some local scientist and establish a partnership of my own, or do you have resources in this area that I could draw upon?

And the second comes from Eduardo in Argentina:

We are a little group of teachers from that want to create a environmental Weblog. In a primary phase we are going to develop these weblog using the Globe Project information like point to begin . Our idea is to create a weblog form the Argentine environmental situation oriented to the teachers and students from our country. The spanish is going to be language. My Question is if you have any scheme of cost that I can use to analyze the possibilities of these project. Thank you very much by all the information that you can give to us.

For Christopher, I think it would be good to look at both local and national programs. Some ones that come to mind as potentially good for educators is Spider Web Watch and ecology projects like World Water Monitoring Day. Cornell of course has good resources for citizen science in education, and you'd want to investigate GLOBE as well. Locally, I'd contact watershed conservation groups and the local Audubon Society and ask about programs they might have. While I've focused on mostly national programs on this site, the local initiatives are really exciting and probably where the bulk of citizen science, by most definitions, is happening today.

Eduardo's question is more difficult. Web site costs vary widely, and development expenses can mount rapidly (and sometimes without achieving what it is you set out to do). This is a typical scenario: someone has a vision of a web site with great features, and they start to detail exactly what they want. The vision grows as you develop the details, and you can easily wind up with a complex and costly development project that never quite reaches its goal. It's good to think about what you'd like to achieve long term, but think of it as a project in stages. What do you really need at that first very limited stage? Develop that and see how it works. You'll likely find out that the road to your final vision is very different than you expected. If you can build off of work someone else has done, do that first. Unfortunately, this is usually an unsatisfactory answer to someone asking "how much does a web site cost", but it's the reality of how web sites are made. However, there are many free blogging systems; start with one of those (I'm currently recommending WordPress), use a free template to start with, and you'll only have the cost of web hosting to start with.

What ideas or recommendations do you have for Christopher and Eduardo? Post them in the comments!

Posted by terrie at May 30, 2007 06:00 AM

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