[Teacher voiceover]

Today we’ve taken a field trip out to an environmental education center, and we have groups from sixth grade all the way through 11th grade with us today. The educational center that we are at is located on a quarry mining site, actually a crush limestone stone site, and the owners of the company were asked to remediate or mitigate part of their property back to how it was before they began mining.

The plan was to come out to the remediation site or the mitigation area and take GPS units and map a boundary around the outside of the mitigation area. Depending on the area they were at, students determined if they needed to take a picture in a waypoint, or were they going to take a temperature water temperature or test the pH. There was actually an area around the mitigation site that looked like maybe it was a hog pit, and it had some debris in it. So it was interesting to test the pH of that water area versus the water of the mitigation area.

A lot of times you think that technology is a very sedentary application. Either you’re behind the computer and you’re manipulating data, or getting content from the internet. Today we wanted to show kids that you can actually take technology out in the field.

[Student 1 speaking]

If you could actually go out into a field and do that work yourself, it’s so more involved, and I mean, I can see everything that they do and actually do it myself.

[Teacher voiceover]

That active learning that the kids were doing out here today would absolutely not be possible if they were just sitting in the classroom, to be able to see the connections made between the classroom and the real world today using the technology. Using the probe and seeing how that how the technology will actually pay off in the end is something that could never be obtained just by being in the classroom.