Making marine science personal and portable: Florida elementary and high school students work together in aquatic-study projects. Their tools of choice? Palm handhelds with cameras and probes.

It seems only natural that marine science should be important in Manatee County, which encompasses Bradenton, Fla., and its surrounding areas on the state's west coast. The abundance of ocean and waterways has a big impact on all manner of life here. It also serves as a convenient and unrivaled laboratory for the county's schools.

"We live in a very aquatic environment," explains instructional technology specialist Nan Sisemore. "We're on the Gulf of Mexico and we also have bays and freshwater rivers. It's especially important for our students to understand the kind of environment we live in, how fragile it is, and how important all the factors are that influence it."

With those concerns in mind, Sisemore helped write a successful grant two years ago that merged nature and new technology and created an unusual collaboration between the county's youngest and oldest students.

The idea behind the grant was to take grade 11 and 12 oceanography students at Manatee High School in Bradenton and pair them with youngsters at neighboring Sea Breeze Elementary School. During the 2001-2002 school year, different classes of high school students led five field trips to aquatic sites around the county--each time accompanied by an entire grade from Sea Breeze. Their destinations ranged from beaches to wetlands to an area where saltwater and freshwater environments converge.

"This was a way for our students to put into action some of the things that they were learning in the classroom," says Sisemore.

Handhelds Lead the Learning Experience

The grant used federal funds administered by Manatee County, and it paid for 30 Palm IIIc handhelds connected to Kodak PalmPix cameras as well as an additional 15 Palm computers equipped with ImagiWorks' probes. "We thought the cameras would work well with the elementary students and that the probeware would work well for the high school students," says Tina Barrios, the county's supervisor of instructional technology. "So we thought, 'Wouldn't it be good to bring the two together?'"

The high school's junior and senior students and the elementary students had already met through e-mail exchanges. They did their face-to-face work in small groups, with a particular focus on making measurements using their handhelds with the probes.

"The elementary school kids would go down to the water and bring back a sample in a cup. Then the high school students would put the probes in and let the younger ones read what the probes said," Sisemore explains. "There were also charts, which the high school students had put up which showed what the dissolved oxygen should be, what levels were good and what levels were bad. Then the students would take a sample from another location and talk about the differences in their readings."

This activity was just one of many that took place at different stations. Other stations focused on pH levels or comparative water temperatures. Still others provided microscopes to view small organisms such as plankton or let students examine live specimens captured temporarily in nets. The younger students even had coloring stations, where they could render what they were seeing in the familiar medium of crayon.

Crossing Grade Levels

The presence of both Palm computers and older students made a big impact on Suzanne Tomlin's fifth graders, who used their handhelds to take pictures and notes from their field trip to the Manatee River.

"They were excited about using the Palm handhelds because it was something new," Tomlin says. "But they also were able to take really good notes so that when they came back and we were having class discussion about what went on, they had good recall because they could refer back to those notes easily. It's very difficult to take paper and pen out to the beach with you. A little splash of water on the paper and your ink is running.

"Our kids were incredibly receptive to the high school students. It was amazing to watch them with the older children and how well they listened and took notes. With young students in the classroom, sometimes their minds are wandering and they aren't focusing. But they were engaged in their learning out there, and the high school students were incredibly knowledgeable about their subject matter.

"The high school students were happy to oblige," adds Diane Hamilton, who teaches marine science at Manatee High School. "They really enjoyed the chance to teach and explain things rather than sitting in the classroom absorbing information," she says. "It was a real opportunity for them to tell what they knew."

Using the probes for field research also set the stage for more advanced analysis back in the high school classrooms. "The handhelds made gathering data so much easier," Hamilton says. "Using the probes to collect pH values, dissolved oxygen, and temperatures worked better than using the test kits we had in the past. The students could press buttons on their handhelds to change the data into graphs or bar graphs. Then, they were able to draw their own conclusions about the ecosystems they were studying. We were all surprised that the waters were healthier than we thought they would be."

Kindergartners Join In

The collaboration between the two schools gave additional meaning to the term "K-12 education." When Karen Rinehart volunteered her kindergarten class to participate, "It was really awesome," she says. "Of course, my children had no idea of what a Palm computer was in the first place."

They had a much better idea after making several trial picture-taking runs with their handhelds around the school with Rinehart. Then they launched into the field, with an emphasis on critical thinking. "They could take pictures of anything that they thought was important, but they had to know what the importance was and then they had to write about it," Rinehart explains. "So they became more focused. They had to observe and think and make their choices about the photographs they were going to take. They felt like they had ownership of the pictures, and that helped them write their stories afterwards."

On past outings, Rinehart usually took the pictures herself, got them developed over a period of days, and scanned them one by one into a computer. "I don't think that my students observed things very closely in the field when I did it that way," she says.

Although the Manatee project was funded for just one school year, the two participating schools have continued using their Palm handhelds to spur learning. Hamilton's marine science classes take them on their own frequent field trips, where various teams of students beam data back and forth to each other. Suzanne Tomlin, meanwhile, has her class take notes and pictures whether they are going to the beach or the theater.

"We use the handhelds now on almost every field trip," she says, "because we have the ability to take the pictures, take notes, and come back and have wonderful discussions on what we were out there on that field trip for."

Looking to Expand Handheld Projects

"What we've seen is that the students are much more likely to do and complete their assignments," adds instructional technology supervisor Barrios. "We see them probing deeper into the content. We could have the same exact lessons without the technology, but this way the students are going deeper and asking better questions."

"It was a great success," says Sisemore about the original project. "Everybody involved with it would like to do it again."

The transition to block scheduling has shrunk the available time for field trips and budget constraints have left no money for transportation. But this collaboration is continuing on a smaller scale, this time between high schoolers and students from Manatee Elementary School, a magnet school that is within walking distance from several aquatic sites.

Meanwhile Barrios and several fifth-grade teachers have been developing innovative classroom uses for the Zire71 Palm handhelds she plans to acquire as part of a No Child Left Behind grant. At-risk fifth graders, each of whom would keep a handheld around the clock, would use the new models, equipped with built-in digital cameras.

"I want to look at the ways handheld technology in a one-on-one environment is appropriate for teaching and learning," Barrios says. "We have been sharing sets of Palm computers among classrooms, but these teachers will have an entire classroom set used only by their students."

Those teachers are putting together a Palm-based curriculum, which includes taking notes on their handhelds, then writing stories, and sharing those stories in the form of an e-book with other students at the school.

Other plans include promoting skill sets such as reading for content and developing vocabulary. In the latter area, students will keep a list of vocabulary words on their handhelds, write sentences using those words, expand the sentences into stories, and beam the results to their teachers.

Ronald Schachter is a freelance education writer based in Newton, Mass.