Digital Bridge to Nature

I am consulting with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to facilitate teacher workshops about digital nature photography.

This fantastic program, funded by an LCCMR grant, gives teachers (grades 3-9) of all disciplines the knowledge and tools (i.e. digital cameras) needed to bring nature photography into the classroom and plug students into nature.

Each FREE four-hour workshop is standards-based, and is designed to provide training for approximately 12-20 teachers of any subject area.

The format covers the use of digital cameras, basic photo tips, a hands-on photo activity, reveiwing and discussing the photos taken by staff during the photo activity, downloading and editing techniques, and student project ideas. We’ll show how to enhance your curriculum, not add to it!

After the workshops teachers have access to a classroom set of digital cameras to check out for free from the DNR.

I am facilitating two open workshops at the Como Park Street Car station on October 23, 2010. If you are teacher (grades 3-9) email me to register for the morning (8:00 – 12:00) or the afternoon (12:30 – 4:30) workshop. Hurry, space is filling up fast!

On July 11, we had a kick-off event in Luverne, Minnesota sponsored by Jim Brandenburg and his family. We practiced our photography in Blue Mounds State Park where we were all astounded and thrilled to find the rare western prairie fringed orchid.

Jim B. Photographing a Western Fringed Prairie Orchid, Photo by Jane Eaton, Diamond Path Elementary

The blog Information is Beautiful is a demonstration of how art and creativity transform dry data into something stunning, attractive, and readily meaningful.

Check out this musical zen planetary interactive.

Solar System Music Box

Or this climate change graphic When Sea Levels Attack.

When Sea Levels Attack

Black Crappie Image From the Leader's Guide

I finally got a chance to take an indepth look at MinnAqua’s Leader’s Guide.

I knew it would be good because it won a 2008 NAI Interpretive Media Award, but it far exceeded my expectations. I anticipated a curriculum guide much like the Project WET and WILD guides – which are great resources. However, the MinnAqua Guide builds on the template in a couple major ways.

First, each chapter contains an impressive quantity of local aquatic natural history, essentially eliminating the need to seek out other sources to build your knowledge or to tweak activities to be locally applicable. The guide is alone worth reading to simply increase your natural history knowledge.

Second, the guide also comes with a CD containing a plethora of seriously impressive images, especially of fish. No simple line drawings here, think detailed full-color images that look like the fish jumped out of the water onto your page.

The guide also includes hyper-detailed evaluations of how each lesson meets Minnesota’s Academic Standards and ready-to-use assessment quizzes and standards. To top it all off, the entire guide was reviewed by over 100 experts in various fields so you can feel ultra-confident about the accuracy of the content.

You can get a copy by attending or hosting a MinnAqua Educator Workshop. Contact Michelle Kelly for more info.

Public domain image from grandmasgraphics.com

I think I may have found a great potential resource for environmental educators on BoingBoing today: A website called Grandma’s Graphics is full of free public domain images which I think are pulled from old children’s books. 

BUT there have been so many people visiting, and trying to visit, Grandma’s Graphics who saw it on BoingBoing that it broke the website. I’m sure it will be fixed shortly, and then we can see if this a treasure cove of images or a dud.

The Wild Woods Guide

This website, created by John P. Loegering (a Wildlife Ecologist at the U of M),  is a handy compilation of websites for gardeners and naturalists seeking info about land and wildlife management. 

The book The Wild Woods Guide is an indispensable book full of interesting and little-known facts about north woods animals, plants, weather, and more. Written by journalists, this books gives a different perspective on what people find intriguing about the north woods. Lots of little facts, like name origins and connections to historic lore, that will make you seem like a super -genius if you spit them out during a program. Also, the couple-page-long chapters make for perfect bus reading and easy referencing. 

ScienceBlogs – Environment Channel is a compilation of blogs written by professional earth scientists. Its the best resources for discovering the new research, trends, and for getting sound scientific responses to current issues. These blogs are all personal soap-boxes for the authors, so you get a non-censored perspective which can be refreshing. These blogs are also great inspiration if you are trying to create a press release which connects to current issues. 

Website to watch: Telling River Stories is the brain-child of Patrick Nunnally of the River Life Program hosted by the Institute on the Environment at the U. The website is a connection to river stories accessed through a geographic interface. Its similar to the Friends of the Mississippi River‘s Field Guide, but for the entire Mississippi River. 

Free images from the Fish and Wildlife Service! As an environmental educator I was always looking for high-res copyright free images of animals, plants, and landscapes to use for programs. This FWS website a great resource! 

Those are just a few resource which I hope are new and helpful for you! There are of course lots more (link to a compilation created by the Sharing Environmental Education Knowledge website).  If you have additional good resources to share, send ‘em my way!