AUTUMN 2002/VOLUME 16, NUMBER 4

The Educator's Guide to Bird Study
By ANNE JAMES-ROSENBERG AND RICK BONNEY
A dynamic resource now available on the Web <www.birds.cornell.edu/schoolyard>
 

The "Educator's Guide to Bird Study" is an online resource for anyone who wants to teach about birds.
Students in Karen Vitek's classes at Nassau School know their birds. They've had lots of hands-on experience studying birds at the feeders and nest boxes in their schoolyard in Poughkeepsie, New York. They've also made good use of online resources, learning about their local birds and entering data collected as part of Classroom FeederWatch and The Birdhouse Network.

They've even retrieved data online to analyze and graph results for original research projects on topics such as "Effect of wind on birds' eating habits." Each of these online activities is now available through a new Lab of Ornithology web site, "Educator's Guide to Bird Study" (EGBS).

Background
EGBS is the culmination of several years of training educators to use our citizen-science projects and responding to intensive feedback from numerous meetings and questionnaires. The web site makes available-to any educator, anywhere-a treasure trove of tips and resources based on the experiences of hundreds of talented educators. Recognizing that the Web is one of the best ways to reach and support the largest numbers of educators, we recently shifted our focus from training individual teachers to providing guidance and materials to many more teachers through EGBS.

What's on the web site and who will use it?
Our new web site is intended to help any educator-even those with limited knowledge of birds-to use bird studies with their classes. Let's start with a middle-school science teacher who has no previous experience teaching about birds or using our citizen-science projects.

Going to the EGBS web site, she might first look into the "Getting Started" section, including "Learn About Birds: 10 Easy Ways to Get Started," with links to more detailed descriptions for each activity. The "Ten Easy Ways…" include taking a bird walk, setting up a bird-feeding area (including resources like students' homemade feeder plans), studying color variation of a local pigeon flock, and putting up and monitoring a nest box for cavity-nesting birds. After choosing an activity, she might click on the "All About Birds" link where she will find loads of information on a wide variety of topics such as "Bird ID," "Feeding Birds," "Landscaping," and "Schoolyard Tips."

"This is one web site I'll come back to again and again. I don't know of anywhere else that teachers and students can find such wonderful resources."

Now that she's hooked, she's ready to look at "Citizen-Science Projects." This section of the web site introduces the concept of citizen science-involving the public in professional research to help answer large-scale questions about biology. It outlines the key features of each of the Lab's citizen-science projects and includes links to "Project Guides" with lists of links providing activities and resources specific to each citizen-science project.

If the educator wants more general resources, including dozens of activities and ideas for teaching with birds, she would go to the "Educators' Resources" section of the EGBS. There, she would also find "Funding Pointers," suggestions for making interdisciplinary connections, an extensive bibliography, and connections to National Science Education Standards (NSES).

Research
The National Science Foundation and NSES have mandated that students engage in extended inquiry modeled by the teacher and that research occur in the classroom. The EGBS web site provides the online resources and support that teachers need to implement these standards. Another example of an educator's use of the new site would be a teacher who participated in Classroom FeederWatch last year and had a lot of fun learning about birds with the kids, but didn't quite get around to doing anything with the students' data. This year he is ready to dig into the data and have his students conduct their own research projects. In the "Student Research" section of EGBS, he'd find an outline of the inquiry-based methods of citizen science, as well as resources for following that method.

These are just a couple of examples of how educators might use this new resource web site. Birds are beautiful, fun, wonderfully accessible study subjects offering endless opportunities to observe nature. We've heard from English, art, math, and shop teachers, and librarians whose students successfully used bird studies and/or our citizen-science projects-and had fun doing it.

A dynamic resource
Educators get many of their best ideas from other educators, and the Educator's Guide to Bird Study web site provides a place to share some of the many ingenious ways that educators have implemented bird studies and our citizen-science projects. By inviting teachers to contribute their ideas on an ongoing basis, we can continue to expand and improve this resource. Send us your favorite activities, ideas, successes, and challenges to share with all the other educators out there working to help make the world a better place for birds-and students. Write to Anne James-Rosenberg by clicking here.
Suggested citation: James-Rosenberg, Anne and Rick Bonney. The Educator's Guide to Bird Study. Birdscope, newsletter of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Autumn 2002. <www.birds.cornell.edu>

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Miyoko Chu, Editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, New York. Phone (607) 254-2451. Email mcc37@cornell.edu