Ecology Lesson: Curriculum Guide

This curriculum guide offers ways to include this ecology lesson into your classroom, a student tracking guide to help students and their teacher track their progress in the lesson, ways to extend this lesson, and information on using Cocoa and text transfer on the website.

• Interdisciplinary Lesson
• Student Tracking Guide
• Extensions
• Getting Cocoa
• Using Text Transfer

Interdisciplinary Lesson

This ecology activity is an ideal interdisciplinary lesson that can be pulled into science, social studies, language arts, art, and technology class. An original ecology activity that inspired this new internet based version was taught at the Aleknagik School in Alaska which followed an interdisciplinary philosophy or, as it was called there, a "thematic approach" to education. At this school, ecology was one of the science based themes that all other classes revolved around. During the time set aside for science, the students studied the science of ecology. During the social studies time, the emphasis was placed on the ecological awareness of Native American culture and the students learned about Native America. During language arts, the students read Native American and stories from other cultures that included ecological concepts, they then wrote their own stories that included elements of their own ecosystem. In art class, the students drew pictures or created dioramas of their own local ecosystems. This new internet based activity, pulls ecology into the technology class. Students can use the internet to share their own local ecosystems with other students from around the world.

Extensions

Further Study:

Situational/Cognitive apprenticeship. You are essentially asking students to become cultural biologists (ethno-biologists). Have them first discover what cultural biologists do and what their work conditions are like. You could then have them research the following questions:

• How does the natural world influence culture and tradition?
• How does this address the nature of science?

Students could start with this activity and keep these questions in mind as they work through the ecology lessons. In the future, video clips may be available to help students see a Yup'ik cultural biologist.

Ecology Challenge:

Technology and Environmental change. To increase interactivity, students may be asked to work on the computers to develop a system that demonstrates and examines how the ecology changes with the introduction or elimination of different species. The Yup'ik ecology lessons use Cocoa to demonstrate changes in the ecology and the traditional predator/prey model. Students can use this web-based program to develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between the different members of the community and the habitat by creating their own ecosystem in Cocoa or representing another system of their choosing (i.e. desert, forest, urban, rural, etc...).

Potential problems: Cocoa is currently only available for the Macintosh. However, other programs like PiViT, Model-It, and Inspiration allow students to do an in-depth study of ecosystem functionality. PiViT and Model-It are University of Michigan programs. Model-It is expected to become available commercially, and it will be PC compatible.

Getting Cocoa

System Requirements

• Macintosh computer (Cocoa is not available for Windows)
• Netscape 2 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 minimum

Downloading the Plugin

If an alert box appears, click on "Plugin Information." If no alert box appears, then go to http://cocoa.apple.com/cocoa/plugin.html and select the "Downloading Cocoa" Page. From there, choose the appropriate version for your computer.

After downloading the file, launch the file called "Cocoa DR Plugin Installer." You will be asked if you want to install the "Cocoa plugin." Click "install." You will then be prompted for a location to install the plugin. Select the Plugin folder in your Netscape or Internet Explorer folder.

Quit the installer. Close your browser and then restart it. From now on you will be able to view Cocoa Worlds.

Text transfer

Computer based:

Notebook. When students respond to questions or have a comment to make about the program, their comments will be sent to whatever notebook program your computer supports. Look in the preferences part of the web browser you are using, find the applications portion and set .txt files to be opened by your notebook program. This part of the program has not been completed, but once the text students enter can be transferred to the notebook, the instructor needs only to open each student's notebook on the computer to evaluate the student's progress. Instructors may also ask students to print their notebook files from the ecology database (should we store the information there), if printing capabilities are available to the students. This allows the instructor more time to go over each students' writings should the computers be unavailable for any reason.

Manual:

Monitoring progress. If the computer notebook is not running or is unavailable on some school computers, instructors may want to have students keep a notebook with the information that they learned or use the "Student Tracking Guide" that accompanies this curriculum guide. The goal of the tracking guide is to allow instructors to monitor each student's progress and have easy access to what the students have been doing during the ecology lesson, as well as allowing the student to keep track of their ownprogress through the program.

Computer shortage. Should technology not be readily available for all students, instructors may want to have students sit in groups around the computer to read through the text, then print the pages from the web site (habitat and community information pages) that ask for student input. This would allow all of the students to simultaneously take part in the ecology lesson while keeping track of their progress through the program.

Print outs. Any portion, or all of the pages in the ecology lesson, can be printed and rearranged according to how you wish to teach each lesson. The ecology lessons may be divided into small sections: masks and animals, ecosystems, habitat, community, food chains, food webs, biomes. Any one section may be separated from the others, (i.e. the habitat lesson may be separated from community and taught as a whole using the printed pages with the worksheet as a summary). The student tracking guide checklist provided with this curriculum guide is mainly for the 'masks and animals' pages, to give some order and guidance to students as they maneuver through the pages. However, these 'masks and animals' pages may also be printed and distributed to the students according to resource availability.