EAA Trout Hatch Project: Learning through Social Networking

At the Easton Area Academy, I am working with the high school science teacher on a project through Trout Unlimited.  We currently have trout eggs in a darkened tank in our school lobby, and will be following them through the process with our students as they become fingerlings.  To keep my students engaged and interested in this long term project, I plan to use Twitter and Paper.li for updates, questions, resources and more.  A more detailed project description follows:

“The EAA Trout Hatch Project Daily”

Goals: To enhance our Trout Unlimited Trout Hatching Project, I will encourage student involvement through the use of Twitter and Paper.li so that students can easily view updates and news on trout and environmental issues as well as share information on the progress of the eggs as they advance to fingerlings.

Objectives: The students will create locked Twitter accounts and follow my @shawnmcentire account as well as @EAATroutHatch and classmates.

Instructions: Students will create a “safe” Twitter account using the laptops provided by the school district.  They will use the Edit Profile feature to “Protect My Tweets” and will be instructed to follow me, as well as the @EAATroutHatch project.  They will then need to bookmark our Paper.li site http://paper.li/EAATroutHatch which will take our Twitter stream and extract links to any news stories, photos, videos, and so forth, which it then analyzes to determine whether or not the stories are relevant.

After everything has been set up, the students will refer to Twitter and to our Paper.li to find out more information about trout in general, and about our trout, specifically.  I will use the @EAATroutHatch account to share photos and videos of the trout progress, and students will be encouraged to tweet questions or comments relating to the project.

Evaluation:   Evaluation will be ongoing.  Student participation will be graded based on tweets and interaction, using the rubric pictured below. 

View my Twitter account here:  http://www.twitter.com/EAATroutHatch 

View our Paper.li here:  http://paper.li/EAATroutHatch