SHARING, EVALUATION, AND CONTINUATION OF OUR PROGRAM

We shared our water testing results at the TMACOG Student Watershed Watch conference in November. But, we went beyond that. With the goal of remaining environmentally friendly, we chose to share information about our program in a 100% paperless fashion.  News about what we were doing was shared among students and parents in the community through our school's Learning Management System, Schoology, and through the Remind app.

We also made a twitter account to disseminate information. The twitter handle is @nhsoesl. Updates about our water testing, Clean Your Streams activity, and classroom explorations were all tweeted to this location, as well as my twitter account -- Lara Fish. I felt that sharing in this way would get the word out about our program to a wider audience.  I was happy with the overwhelming response to our program when I shared this blog. My pinned tweet was re-tweeted

The blog was viewed 1,448 times.

A pinned tweet was re-tweeted 37 times and favorited 58 times.

Important people like superintendents, other teachers, and even the Ohio EPA talked about, favorited, and shared my blog, which outlines our water testing program.

Evaluation

Because our water testing program is part of Ohio science standards, we will be building on what has been learned this past year.  We collected water samples both in the school and outside, both at the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, and at Dry Creek, on the twenty acres of land which is being restored to a native habitat by several different organizations. Our evaluation focused on having students pass the Student Learning Objectives for 7th grade science with at least a 75%.  At least 90% of our students passed their SLO's.


OUTDOOR LEARNING AND WATER TESTING -- TO BE CONTINUED...

We will be building on our water testing program in many ways, which includes more involvement in the TMACOG Student Watershed Watch, improvement in water testing data collection, and a focus on taking what we have learned in the 2015-16 school year-- that for our local creek, high level of phosphorus seems to be the largest issue -- and collecting more samples to both confirm or refute our previous findings as well as to create a "big picture" of what is going on with our water. Now that students are more comfortable with going to the creek and taking water samples, my goal is for older students to collaborate with 7th grade students to help them test the water and understand how this data can be analyzed and used to make recommendations to our city and area governmental organizations. Connecting students with the community through water testing has been, and will be an excellent way to promote an important issue by allowing students BE scientists as they problem solve about one of the biggest issues facing our society today and into the future.