Currently we're in Sutton's Bay Michigan
and we're on the Inland Seas,
learning all about environmental monitoring
and what's going on on the Great Lakes
and trying to answer the big essential question of
"are the Great Lakes healthy?"
Inland Seas has been around for thirty years.
Our goal is to take people out,
teach them about what's under the Great Lakes
what constitutes the health of the Great Lakes
beyond what you can just see?
And what they can do to help be stewards in the future.
The NOAA B-WET grant has allowed us to expand our reach.
So, we've had teachers from Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin,
and throughout the whole of Michigan
be able to come to our professional development training.
To be able to take
those teachers out on field trips
and really get them connected to this large watershed
that we're all a part of
will really increase the quality of the types
of watershed education that they'll bring to their students.
I was accepted to do the field course.
I was also offered the opportunity to bring
students to the Inland Seas
which is super, super valuable.
You can teach things in the classroom on a Power Point,
but it's another thing to bring them out here
and give them the opportunity to do this.
So, part of the benefit to the teachers
who attended the field course
was that they received through that NOAA grant
a full scholarship to take their students out on the school ship.
So, we're in the middle of our rotations right now on the ship
and in benthos we're finding some good midge larvae.
We're finding a lot of quagga mussels.
In the fish station we've caught some rock bass
and a lot of invasive round gobies.
The micro plastics group has trawled for micro plastics.
And then we have water quality down below looking at the oxygen level
- the dissolved oxygen in the water -
and looking at the pH,
and it seems like our plankton group got a really great sample today, too.
Having that experiential education
really sparked something for the students and gets them excited about
water and water health.
And to be able to bring that back to their classrooms
and translate that spark into stewardship of their own watershed
is my goal as a place-based educator.
We're at Clay High School right now
in the environmental and agricultural technologies program.
We came back and talked about, you know,
like, what was the most interesting thing that you learned in Sutton's Bay
and how can you develop those things that you learned and we're really interesting
into projects here?
So we're gonna be picking Phragmites today out of our wetland,
removing them a little bit at a time.
Their stewardship project is to remove Phragmites.
They'll also be looking at Lake Erie and compare
some of the Great Lakes issues between Lake Michigan and Lake Erie.
My students have the opportunity to complete agriscience fair projects.
I thought our involvement in this program would help us gain ideas to implement.
This year was really unique for us because we got to travel up to
Suttons Bay, Michigan to test water quality on a school ship schooner,
which was sponsored by the B-WET program.
And we were able to come back to our local area
and utilize what we learned
in order to test Wolf Creek.
And we hope you enjoy our video!
It helped a lot knowing actually what we were doing
rather than just being in a classroom being taught.
Actually going out on the boat being able to sample.
It's nice being able to really understand
and use those skills to the best of our ability rather than just briefly
learning over them in class.
It was a chance to see how water impacts the community level
all the way to the global level.
It's really nice to be able to apply what we've learned
in an actual local sense I guess.
"The most creative presentation
that goes to Clay High School"
I'm just really really thankful to be a part of this program
and to have the opportunity to bring students here.
It's probably one of the highlights of my career.
We got to experience this together
and kids are gonna remember this, like, their entire life.