Professional Development Web Seminars

Check out these on-line professional development web seminars about pollinators, gardening, and conservation. All of the webinars were hosted by the National Science Teachers Associaiton.

WEB SEMINARS FOR TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS

  • Teacher Training Web Seminar: Designing, Planning, and Creating Schoolyard Gardens
    This webinar presented ideas on how to get started and use an outdoor classroom to meet education standards.

    Martin Bomar, a parent volunteer at Ashland Elementary School in Prince William County, Virginia, and an employee of the USDA-Farm Service Agency in Washington D.C., discussed how gardens can be used for hands-on learning opportunities for young students. The school staff, students, and parents created an Earth Day Garden in spring 2009.  Since then, the garden has provided a growing collaborative, sustainable outdoor teaching environment to satisfy teachers’ and students’ quest for knowledge and provide continuous service-learning opportunities. 

    This garden evolved to ensure the outdoor area would support and enhance concepts within all six grade levels of Virginia’s Science Standards of Learning. Ten major areas of teaching emphasis were developed in the garden to accomplish this goal: food production, pollinator garden habitat, fruit production, water garden, recycling and composting, soil conservation, weather data recording, outdoor classroom, recreation and reflection, and a sensory garden. With the assistance of many stakeholders, within the school and from the school community, and with the complete buy-in by the school administration, students and teachers were quickly able to “dig in.”

    Mike Hill, landscape architect with the USDA Forest Service, discussed how to get a schoolyard garden started including deciding where to put the garden, determining how large it will be, dividing responsibilities for who will be involved in planning and planting, involving students, deciding what to grow, and tackling landscape challenges. Mr. Hill has been centrally involved in developing and caring for a garden at Bailey’s Elementary School in Fairfax County. CLICK HERE to go to the archive of the web seminar.
    http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/symposia_seminars/PollinatorLive/webseminar3.aspx

  • Teacher Training Web Seminar: Bees Can Teach Science! Meet Standards by Studying Pollinators in the Field and Classroom
    This web seminar presented ideas about how to study pollinators in the field and classroom. Discover Life has several projects to understand plant-insect interactions designed so that everyone can participate and contribute to real science studies. Nature's Partners is an inquiry learning-based curriculum that can be use in the field or classroom. CLICK HERE to go to the archive of the web seminar.
    http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/symposia_seminars/PollinatorLive/webseminar2.aspx.

  • Teacher Training Web Seminar: Schoolyard Garden Basics
    This web seminar presented schoolyard garden basics. One way to help pollinators and reconnect today's children to the outdoors is through gardening. Schoolyard gardens can be outdoor classrooms where they hone their academic skills and nurture their innate curiosity and creativity. Eliza Russell and Nicole Rousmaniere from the National Wildlife Federation discussed essential features of schoolyard gardens. Principal Cindy Wrenn discussed how the garden was planned with an instructional focus and the ways it continues to be a central part of the K-5 curriculum. CLICK HERE to go to the archive of the web seminar.
    http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/symposia_seminars/PollinatorLive/webseminar1.aspx.