VIRTUAL LABORATORY OF INTERACTIVE TEACHING – A LIVE LABORATORY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE EDUCATION

The progress in e-teaching methods leads to new opportunities for creative use of new technologies in the process of education. Presentation technologies are especially important in the age of Internet and the information flood as attractiveness of the learning content directly leads to the content’s exposure to recipients – both pupils and the general audience.
Environmental science knowledge is easily available in the form that is a universal description of a subject, encyclopaedia-like. Practical use of such information in education may be problematic however as education always happens in the context of some level. Adjusting the terminology and the amount of details for e.g. primary education requires a teacher’s work that has to be repeated by other teachers willing to use such information in their classes.
The Virtual Laboratory of Interactive Teaching (WLIN) is set to address the aforementioned issues. It allows environmental science education to happen in an attractive way and at the same time adjusted to the needs of primary and secondary education.
The main result of the WLIN project is an e-learning portal. The portal provides educational content about the role of deadwood and water in the environment, the water cycle, meteorology, phenology as well as general information concerning forests. Domain experts supplied the knowledge that has been adjusted to various education levels before being turned into a part of the portal’s content. The attractiveness of content is achieved by making it interactive and by an innovative approach of enriching the content with visualizations of data coming from measuring devices connected to the system. The devices include weather stations, remotely controlled cameras and a water flow measurement device.
The measurement devices started collecting data that will form a valuable data source. Special interest is placed on relating meteorological to phenological data. Phenology is the study of timing of life cycle events of plants and animals. Phenological observations are one of the simplest methods of observing climate changes that does not require any special skills nor equipment. Such observations are best done regularly as often as every day and far from urban areas however WLIN uses an automated system for conducting observations based on remotely controlled cameras.
Solutions developed in this project are of unique value, mostly because of the innovative approach to phenological observations. Current observation results will be compared with historical records and that will allow tracking changes in the climate related to meteorological data. The experience gained during realization of the system will aid the development of methods for larger scale deployments of similar systems in the future. Together with the carefully prepared educational content, the implementation of the WLIN educational platform is our way to enhance the system of education in the area of environmental science.