Nebraska Science Teachers Model “Go Outside” Best Practices with Students

By Wesley Fryer On July 9, 2011 · · 1 Comment

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As the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s project, “Go Outside!” exhorts us, we need to get outside and get our students outside in natural environments to learn REAL science as well as develop an environmental ethic as stewards of our world. Nebraska Loves Public Schools, one of my favorite digital storytelling and educational advocacy programs in the United States, recently published the video, “Newman Grove.” The video’s byline on Vimeo is:

At Newman Grove Public Schools, science teachers are using the great outdoors as their classroom, giving students the opportunity to experience the scientific process in its most natural form.

My favorite quotation in the video, at 4:54, is Newman Grove science teacher’s Mark Seier’s statement:

All science is learned in classrooms, and unfortunately most science is learned out of ‘cookbook labs’ where we already know what the answers are going to be before we even start the labs… we do need to be in the classroom to learn the concepts, but if you are ever going to get students excited about science they have to be out and DO it, and discover things that are not known yet.

Take six minutes and watch this short video, then share it with others in your digital as well as face-to-face network. Watching this video, it’s easy to understand why so many Nebraskans LOVE their public schools!

NElovesPS | Newman Grove from NElovesPS on Vimeo.

At Newman Grove Public Schools, science teachers are using the great outdoors as their classroom, giving students the opportunity to experience the scientific process in its most natural form.

I’m featuring Nebraska Loves Public Schools in my closing chapter on “Digital Show and Tell” in my forthcoming EPUB eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” Videos like this one about Newman Grove, Nebraska, are not examples of “quick-edit” and “no-edit” videography: They are professional, educational documentaries at their best. These videos DO showcase the power of digital media to shape perceptions, however, and the ways learners in our schools need to be “storychasers” telling our stories on the global stage of the Internet.

Kudos to the NElovesPS videography team and the Sherwood Foundation in Omaha, which financially supports this phenomenal educational advocacy project. Follow the project @NElovesPS on Twitter and on Facebook to keep getting inspired about wonderful ways teachers and students in Nebraska are learning in PUBLIC SCHOOLS!

NElovesPS | Newman Grove from NElovesPS on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Nebraska educator Beth Still for letting me know about NElovesPS via a badge on her blog, “Nebraska Change Agent.”

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advocacy, learning, nebraska, school, science, teacher, video, loves

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On this day..

http://twitter.com/ideaguy42 Bob Dillon

We have completely embraced this philosophy @mrhmiddleschool as we are both an expeditionary learning school that takes learning outdoors as well as school that values documenting our work so that the learning that takes place each day is transparent for parents and community. We have a collection of our experiences at: http://www.youtube.com/user/mrhmiddleschool. This year we have added the opportunity for additional transparency in the field by using our technology grant to put additional opportunity for students to take video and still so that our work can truly be through the eyes of the learner. Thanks for all that you do.