Trout in the Classroom, NJTU’s innovative conservation education initiative, provides elementary, middle- and high school students all over New Jersey with a year-long opportunity to learn about fish biology, stream habitat and the importance of preserving our cold, freshwater natural resources. Now, thanks to a new, dedicated TIC website that debuted in September 2006, participating students and teachers can also learn from each other.
The website, commissioned and funded by NJTU State Council early last year, currently serves 33 schools around New Jersey and provides an interactive “lab journal” where teachers exchange notes about fish tank conditions and lesson plans, and where students’ work can be showcased for all to see.
“We’re really excited at the dialog that is taking place among Trout in the Classroom educators,” said Brian Cowden, NJTU’s State Coordinator for TIC. “The website answers a lot of the questions that our local Chapter TIC volunteers get on a daily basis during the egg-phase of classroom experience, and having a go-to resource online makes it easier for teachers to anticipate what’s coming up next in their tanks.”
The site is available for public view-only access at http://www.njtroutintheclassroom.org and registered TIC classroom participants must log-in to post observations or comments. NJTU also uses the site to distribute news and announcements about the program and to share resources from TIC programs and fisheries and wildlife authorities in other states.
Designed to incubate a shared, interactive community of educators, TU members, and state fisheries personnel, the website came together as a result of a summer-long collaboration by stakeholder/ volunteers who contributed feedback regarding their usability experiences and individual needs.
“Working with teachers is great,” said Bob Sutton, TU member and principal of Villagewerx, a Gladstone-based web design consultancy responsible for the system. “They’re very quick to adopt technical tools that help them do a better job communicating with students and they’re not shy about discarding ideas that don’t work. Thanks to their enthusiasm, we were able to deliver a fairly complex web project on a tight working schedule. The icing on the cake for our development team was seeing reports of the first trout-egg deliveries online within minutes of the actual event.”
Asked what excites him most about the TIC project, Sutton noted that his twin sons will experience a Trout in the Classroom curriculum at their neighborhood elementary school in 2007-8 and he’s looking forward to the chance to share fish stories with them throughout the year and to monitor their school’s tank via the website.
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