20% Project Pitch--Investigation of San Diego Flora and Fauna

Ecology was the one subject in school I loved but never had the opportunity to pursue. Although I loved discovering how cells worked at the molecular level, as a biology teacher, I now can pursue my other biological interests as well. I love to hike and camp and am always taking pictures and trying to learn about the wildlife around me. I would love to show students how to tune into their environments, pique their curiosity, and inspire them to learn about their local ecosystems and what steps they can take to help protect them.

I want to learn about the native (and invasive) flora and fauna in southern California. This would be a great way for me to bring nature to the classroom, which is great because school's are limited in their ability to take high school students on field trips. Basically, I will go on hiking and camping trips around San Diego, photographing and drawing specimens (animals, birds, plants, insects, etc.) in a field notebook. Then, I will go home and look up the speciman to try and identify it. I will also research information about each speciman to identify what it eats, its life cycle, how it fits into the ecosystem, whether its native or non-native, whether its endangered, etc. I will create a blog to document my findings. 

My hope is to share my findings with my students and encourage them to begin noticing and appreciating their local environment around them. I will assign them extra credit for bringing in photos and summaries of what they find in their backyards or as they are out and about in their neighborhoods. I would love to compile a database of my findings and my student findings into 1 website. We may even be able to join some community science projects, such as counting the number of monarch butterflies sighted at different time of the year to help real scientists with real research on certain ecology problems in our area. This should allow myself and students to learn about our local ecosystem, raise awareness of local environmental issues, and get the students more involved in their local community, all while they learn about biology.

My 20% project will support my personal and professional growth since learning more about biology will help me be a better biology teacher. My project has the potential for deep learning since students can realize that they can take an active part in taking care of their environment. Finally, my project has documented evidence of brainstorming and peer review. Using EdModo and informal discussion with several colleagues and professors, I received several useful recommendations and advice about how to best pursue my project. In addition, it satisfied the need for personal growth and the potential to be successful for students in the classroom. 

Please visit my Symbaloo Webmix for a library of links to sites I will use to help me with this project.