"a program for seventy-five gifted fifth and sixth graders and their six teachers (seven schools) who will use GPS technology to develop and explore curriculum about Lee County environmental features specifically upland habitats of gopher tortoises."

This program is made possible because a Florida Department of Education grant called

"Gopher the Cache!"

was submitted by

Cathy Cochrane, M.S. Teacher on assignment for Gifted Programs, Lee County School District and

Cindy Bear, M.S. Resource Teacher, Environmental Education Program, Lee County School District

with support from

Lynne Coris, M.S. Teacher on Assignment for Staff Development, Lee County School District

Nora Egan Demers, PhD. FGCU College of Arts & Sciences: ndemers@fgcu.edu

The Lee County School District Gifted Education and Environmental Education Programs collaboratively received a Florida Department of Education Challenge Grant from the Department of Education to provide enhanced science education opportunities to a team of seventy-five gifted fifth and six grade students and their teachers.  This includes training teachers and student citizen-scientists in complex science skills including data collection, and communication of scientific results.  A component of the grant is the assistance of these citizen-scientists with collecting and analyzing scientific data for an ongoing University research project.

This project expands on the interest of students in Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology by providing them training in use of GPS for habitat studies in their local community.  The students will advance from geo-caching to Earth Caching to using skills of experts and serving as citizen scientists gathering information on local habitats.  (The students will establish Earth Cache sites on their school campuses).  The science content will be advanced and a priority placed on natural history of upland habitats and gopher tortoises in Lee and Collier County, Florida.  Teachers in the project were selected based on their previous use of GPS in their classrooms. 

 The teachers of gifted students at several Lee County public schools (located in Cape Coral, FL) will receive training in natural history and in field monitoring techniques at a set of workshops conducted at Barefoot Beach Preserve and at the FGCU campus on August 16, 2008.  The participants will be presented with life history details about the gopher tortoise in the morning, and trained to identify potential gopher tortoise forage and prepare reports of those data during the afternoon session. 

The teachers will educate their students on these topics and methodologies during regular classes during the Fall of 2008 using their home campus as a field training site. 

In December of 2008, the Environmental Education program of Lee County will lead field trips for these teachers and their students to Yellow Fever Creek Preserve (YFCP), a publicly owned upland site.  These teams of trained participants (Teachers and Gifted students) will be provided with forage inventory data collection worksheets and explicit instructions on how to conduct a forage inventory (from Ashton, 2008).  The teams will be accompanied by University staff including Associate Professor Demers and other students and staff whose schedule allows.  Student data collection will be replicated by various student teams in order to compare results and assess the validity of student/citizen scientist data collection. The students will provide the forage survey data to University Researcher, Dr. Nora Demers. 

The research component of the program will assess ability of trained citizen-scientists to contribute valid and reliable data to long-term ecological research projects  This project  addresses a number of needs, gaps and desirable outcomes for the Community-Based Long-term Ecological Research Program of Southwest Florida.  There is a need for assistance with long-term monitoring and stewardship of community-purchased and owned conservation lands in Lee County.  Municipal government agencies seldom have adequate staff or budgets for those efforts.  Additionally, scientists have recognized a need to validate public contributions to ecosystem research. 

The organizers of this program look forward to expanding the initiative to other communities. 

	LEARN AND SERVE AND GEOCACHE TRAINING August 7, 2008  Challenger Middle School, Cape Coral FL
	GOPHER TORTOISES AND HABITAT TRAINING  August 16, 2008 Barefoot Beach Preserve (AM Session)  Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL (PM Session)

Gopher the Cache!

Primary initiative of the Community-Based Long term Ecological Research Initiative for Citizen-Scientists of Southwest Florida.

 

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