Watersheds

TIPC Ratings

Students invited guest speakers, county and state employees for questions and demonstrations. Students are given websites, brochures, newspaper articles for their research. They use all of these tools to drive their choices of research and to address their tasks.

The students form their own groups, decided what they wanted to research, decided their own roles in the group and chose which digital tool they wanted to use to communicate. The only requirement that they created for the group was that each group must submit one slide to a group slideshow. They want to inform the public by creating a blog, working with UVA interactive project, Expedition Watershed involvement (a movie including Animal Planet’s Jeff Corwin), and by holding a town meeting with a local senator. The project has been submitted to all of the above. The senator visited and we held the town meeting. The blog is up and running and is always changing with research and response. We are going to share our project on Virtual Share and our town meeting was recorded by Henrico television.

This started as approaching but the students developed it to Ideal/Target because they put so many twist and turns on their research. Each group was researching something different. The students generated their own response to the information from research. They decided the topics they were interested in and investigated them to find out how to help the watersheds as a community. The students realized through critical thinking that people are not the only contributors of polluting watersheds, but that natural resources are the largest contributors. Through this, they decided that local business owners should not have to take all the blame and responsibility for cleaning up the watersheds. Ex. Our first guest speaker was a golf course superintendent and he mentioned that the new legislation regarding phosphorous in fertilizer affected him because he had to dispose of old fertilizer properly, which cost money, and buy new fertilizer. The students started at that point to see the impact of laws and legislation on the local business. After this guest speaker, the students asked each guest about how they were affected financially. The students will continue to work on the blog, they hope to take questions from the public, research the questions, and reply.

The students took their research and decided that they wanted to help educate the community on how to help clean up the watershed. They also wanted to educate that the local business owners need to be protected from having so much costly responsibility. They decided that they would like to present their project through a town meeting to a local senator. The object of the meeting would be to educate the public that came (parents and select others) about their research and present to the senator some ideas to protect watersheds. They also asked the senator what is being done to educate the public. They feel that if the children are educated and parents are educated, people will be more aware of what to do to help our local watersheds. The students also brought in an article from the local paper that mentioned a new movie being made to educate about watersheds. The end of the article presented a website to get involved with the project so one of the groups in class decided to submit our project. The class has submitted a request to UVA to do an interactive project with them through their watershed program. The students wanted to create a blog and send out invites to local community members to help educate about watersheds. The students also created commercials, brochures and a comic life to help educate. The students will continue to work on the website throughout the year.