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Birds on the Net

A Student Research Project on Birds

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First graders using the Internet to study birds? Why?

Our birds research project began with a summer class, a week of sessions about the Internet. The goal was to produce accessible curriculum using online resources. I decided to focus on birds, a unit I'd done successfully in the past several times. It seemed logical that I'd feel secure doing something familiar while using an unfamiliar resource--the Internet.

Cruising sites, I found more than I could digest, packed away in odd corners, lurking behind confusing strings of letters. I staggered from one to another, hungry for information but often tied up in traffic. Some sites were always busy, some were labyrinthian, most at that time (summer of 1994) no richer (sometimes a lot less so) than a good book about birds, and the graphics painfully slow to load. I teach first and second-graders. How was any of this going to be useful or compelling to them? I can happily get lost just looking a word up in the dictionary, but many of my students are just barely beginning to read. These resources would be more of a hurdle than a help to them. I'd not even started and already the idea wasn't going to work. I felt that books were still a more appropriate way of getting passive information, in addition to the more active methods of field trips and inviting Audubon members to lead us on hikes.

Fortunately we also learned about listservs in the class, and a new angle occurred to me: what if, instead of trying to use webbing and existing data online, we focused instead on the very questions that intrigued the children? What if we let the internet connect us with real live people who had knowledge about birds and who were able to answer whatever questions the children wondered about, spontaneously? What if we had no linear, set lesson plan and instead let their wonderings guide the learning? This had been a goal of mine since starting teaching 22 years before; would the internet finally make it possible to let children steer more of their own education?