Just steps from the largest lake in New Hampshire and with 7,800 acres of water to study and sample in Wolfeboro, students are never far from their subject. Couple this extraordinary location with access to the latest Web 2.0 technologies and a veteran teacher who espouses the idea that education is more meaningful to students when they learn within the context of solving real world applications, and what you have is an empowering learning environment.

Rigor, Relevance, and Social Networking
“So many of our students come to Brewster thinking ‘the teacher is going to tell me what he or she expects me to do,’” explained Gorrill, who is passionate about turning the educational experience into something that’s not teacher directed. “Kids need to be creators of content instead of looking to me for content,” he said.

Gorrill, who is chair of the science department and who has been teaching at Brewster since 1988, has seen a lot of transitions and trends in teaching but nothing has stuck as much as the power of how technology can turn a classroom into the ultimate learning environment. He is excited when he talks about kids creating their own content. He is serious when he speaks about not wanting his students to merely receive information; he’s encouraged to know that the days of standing, delivering information, assigning work to ensure that students received that information, and then testing them are over. He credits this in part to the power of technology. “Technology has changed so much about how our kids can take control of their learning,” he says. He talks about his students using Google Maps to locate and delineate watersheds. “When I grew up, thinking about looking at my house from a satellite was unthinkable.”

His freshwater ecology class is a great example of such empowerment. In this class students choose a watershed (most choose their own communities) and then a topic to study, such as the quality of the drinking water or the impact of invasive species on the watershed. Students are really interested in learning how they can find the answers that will help them dissect their issues, Gorrill explained. They are thirsty to know how you can find the results of local drinking water tests, because it’s something they care about, he added.

And just as students learn the impact of nitrate, phosphate, oxygen, and pH levels in their community watersheds they also learn how to share what they are learning through Web 2.0 technologies, such as podcasts, blogs, wikis, and a Ning network. “Podcasts were a new tool that I had not previously used,” said Brett Conway ’09, a member of the invasive species group. “Producing a podcast allowed me to express my ideas and my knowledge of a topic in an unconventional way and gave me some room to do fun things.”

Technology integration and learning at Brewster have long been synonymous and recently Gorrill has capitalized on the popularity of social networking among students to show how this some times controversial feature can be used positively in the classroom.

At the beginning of the class, students produced individual podcasts (brief audio or video clips) introducing themselves, the watershed they would study throughout the class, and what watershed issue(s) they planned to research. Next they each created a wiki, an electronic web page that is only accessible to members of a specific group; in this case, the members studying the same watershed. The page provides a forum for students to collaborate within. One student’s posting may initiate a “discussion” on the topic or may solicit edits and/or additional relevant research to be shared with each other. “A wiki is really strong if used correctly. The group alone is more intelligent than a person alone,” Gorrill explained.

Students learn right away that their work cannot be done in a vacuum, Gorrill said. They know that their studies are real and how they report and share those findings could have implications beyond the classroom, he said.

Throughout the course – whether sampling lake water, producing a podcast, refining content for the group wiki, or evaluating information to support a theory – Gorrill advises his students while they select their content, make decisions that direct their course progress, and ultimately complete the project with integrity. In doing so, his students gain lifelong learning skills – skills such as critical thinking, information literacy, creativity, and collaboration – that are increasingly vital to their success in the 21st century.

The podcasts, wikis, and blogs conveniently reside within a Ning, a customized social networking platform – a mini private Facebook of sorts – in other words, something the students can relate to.

“The Ning is very useful when we have to learn the other team’s subject,” explained Stefan Lutzenkirchen ’09. “We are always working in teams and once we are done with our work, we try to explain it to the others by creating podcasts, essays, and pictures of our subject. In this way, everybody can share their piece of work resulting in better comprehension. We could compare it with Facebook because every time there is something new on the web site, everybody knows and since the Ning is our fresh-water class, it is as well a community.”

Sample podcasts: Invasive species in Mirror Lake and Testing for PH in lake water.

Building Learning Communities
Gorrill has plenty of ideas on how to get his students involved in hands-on, collaborative learning through technology. He’s appreciative of the opportunity to attend the Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference this past summer where attendees don’t go to listen to presenters but instead go to participate in interactive, hands-on learning projects. The BLC was created by Alan November, one of the first major educators to embrace Web 2.0 technologies in K-12 learning environments and founder of November Learning, an educational consultancy that helps educators prepare students to be empowered learners.

The McDede Professional Development Fund and professional development funds allocated from the Annual Fund afforded Gorrill the opportunity to learn from and meet with innovators in education. He hopes to attend next year with a group of teachers who would then return to campus and together create more empowering learning environments. “The whole conference was about getting kids excited and involved in projects that are exciting to them and helping them build their skills,” he said.

“Mr. Gorrill’s class and technology go hand-in-hand, from his touch screen Smart Board to all of the science equipment that allows us to take samples and analyze the lake,” Conway said. “Being on the water is a great alternative to classroom learning. Taking in nature first hand, compared to … witnessing it through a textbook, like at my previous school, helps make the project more real.”

By Marcia Eldredge, Director of Communications