Taking Flight with Conservation Education

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Originally appears in the Summer 2019 issue.

INCLUDING CONSERVATION education into high school science curricula is important, and I ultimately chose to add bird conservation to my teaching after seeing students’ strong reactions to the calls of migrating Sandhill Cranes. Illinois has adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, which has a performance expectation (HS-LS2-7) addressing human activity and biodiversity, and I have added this lesson to approach the performance expectation by engaging students to think about how humans impact bird population diversity. The cranes were heard while doing invasive species removal with my school’s Environmental Science Club. Students were not sure what type of creature was making the sound and their eyes were glued to the sky trying to find the source. Knowing my students have first-hand experience with birds provided a great foundation for building further understanding of basic conservation principles.

Engaging my ninth-grade Biology students was the next challenge since one of the only birds students care about these days involves 140 characters (i.e., Twitter). I found myself struggling to find lessons and activities that were both appropriate for high school students and involved their using Chromebooks to gather relevant and current information about bird conservation. Developing a Padlet allowed me to create a lesson that was flexible, interactive, and engaging for ninth-grade students to complete using Chromebooks. Padlet is a platform that allows the user to connect related images, websites, maps, photos, and videos.2 Students can access Padlet via the internet or by downloading the Padlet App specifically made for Apple products, Android, and Kindle.2 Each item appears as a post that can have accompanying text and allow viewers to comment. Posts in the Padlet include what bird sounds mean, methods for collecting bird sounds, and bird conservation. My students were focused during the activity and shared their experiences with birds as they worked through the lesson. Students’ making connections to the subject content and their personal experiences made the activity more meaningful and interesting for them. Ending the lesson with a game kept the students engaged made applying what they had just learned fun.