Activity Three for: Experiential Learning

Capturing Changes in Living Organisms at the Orono Bog with Middle School and High School Students

Goals:

· Students are introduced to the concept of change as a comparison of observations separated by some increment of time.

· Students will understand the relationship between time and change.

· Students will understand that within ecosystems, some changes are insignificant and others are more significant.

· Students will understand that within an ecosystem, a change that affects one individual or one species may impact others, as well.

Objectives:

· In the classroom, students will analyze a specific subject for the evidence of visible changes captured by photographic images.

· In the field, students will utilize a camera as the instrument to document visual changes in the organisms they observe at the Orono Bog.

· Students will make multiple observations, so that comparisons can be made between the initial state and the final state of the organism.

· After returning to the classroom, students will post their digital images to the established website so that their current images can be compared with existing photographs.

· Students will analyze the images for patterns of change and will make predictions for the direction and extent of future changes.

Description:

• Students are asked to create an electronic photojournal that depicts change. Their selected images should represent a single subject as it changes with time. The time span should be clearly documented by the student. An example would be family photographs that depict the development of the student from first grade through eighth-grade. Students may choose to use magazine photos, web photos, etc. Students should have to describe their subject, the observable change, the time increment represented, the contextual information extrapolated from the photos and an observable pattern depicted by the photos.

• In the field, student groups are formed. Each group selects a species common to the Orono Bog at that time of year. Each group attempts to capture on film/on video that species/organism undergoing change(s) during their half-day visit at the bog. Depictions might include a spider spinning a web, birds gathering nest building material, sugar maples dropping their foliage in the fall, etc.

• Students process, edit and publish their “change documentary to an established website. Students may choose to either add textual information/labels to their images OR can choose to add an audio narrative to describe the change(s) their group was attempting to record.

Assessment:

• Each student publishes a short electronic essay that hypothesizes what impact/changes the mere presence of the student visitors might have had on the organism/species that they recorded at the bog.