Life Depends on Water—A web tool that connects teachers and students to environmental issues
Today’s standards-based instruction makes it hard to find lessons that help our students understand their impact on the world in which they live. Thanks to a grant from
the Ohio Environmental Agency-Ohio Environmental Education Fund, the Cuyahoga Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) was able to create an interactive environmental education tool that can be accessed from the web and features user-friendly lessons with real life examples of local environmental problems and community challenges. This tool, Life Depends on Water, was created to meet Ohio’s Science Standards and to inform and inspire students, teachers, and the general public into environmental conservation action. It is a resource that can be used in classrooms and beyond to provide direction and challenges to those who are seeking ways to improve the health of our waterways.
Under the direction of Janine Rybka and Rebecca Donaldson of the Cuyahoga SWCD, with technical support from Frank Wilson and Toivo Motter of WVIZ-Ideastream, and educational guidance from Master Teachers Cindy Giulivo, Sarah Quick and Sandy Mooney, the team was able to create an interactive site designed to captivate today’s electronically-oriented students and hook them into learning about water quality related topics in an effort to increase science proficiency in Ohio. The ultimate goal however, was to teach about how we affect the quality of water in our immediate environment.
The creation of Life Depends on Water took two years to design and build. Master teachers helped in the design and local teachers piloted the website in their classrooms and provided critical feedback about content and implementation, which aided in enhancing the final version. The end result is an easy to use tool that gives students a sense of place in their watershed and provides resources to teachers. Most importantly, the teachers who piloted Life Depends on Water found that their students’ science proficiency increased by 10 percent.
WVIZ Ideastream is hosting Life Depends on Water on its website at www.wviz.org/edsvcs/water. Since some schools do not have web access in their classrooms, Life Depends on Water was also copied onto CD-ROMs for classroom use.
For more information about obtaining a copy of the CD-ROM, contact Cuyahoga SWCD at 216-524-6580, ext. 22 or aroskilly@cuyahogaswcd.org.