Jenny started today by talking to us about humans and their drive for connectivity. Adults complain about kids having too much screen time, yet don’t provide them with another means of fulfilling their inner need to connect. It is with this drive that we must ignite students’ passion for connecting with the environment – a completely different yet equally meaningful connection as one they may make with a friend online.

With his term “nature deficit disorder,” Richard Louv opened up a can of worms and empowered hopeless environmental educators: now there was a scientific term for this lack of connection with nature that students were sinking farther and farther into. With the exponential rate that technology moves at, even my childhood was much much different than the childhoods that many children are living right now. I played in the woods and in creeks and anywhere that parents and rules didn’t exist. Tutoring a student a few months ago, I was surprised to see her complete and utter horror at the appearance of an ant (I had had to do some major convincing to get her to study outside on a beautiful May day in the first place).

I’ve said it before (and was nowhere near the first to do so), but, if students are to form meaningful connections with nature, they need to have hands on experiences with it. As the wise Rachel Carson tells us, “it is not half so important to know as to feel when introducing a young child to the natural world” (p. 161 qtd. in Last Child in the Woods). And this brings me to the rationale of my future vision project – to create a place for educators to gather, discuss, and be inspired by ideas, lessons, and projects that support this exact ideal – how to get students out in nature – learning, experiencing, connecting, and loving. And, additionally, how to use technology (which is important and inevitable in today’s world) to enhance,advance, and support environmental education.

In true Jenny fashion, during her ten minute chat with Tess and I today, I completely reworked in my mind how I wanted to develop this blog. I had created a Weebly site (which I showed you all in class), but was brought back to Blogspot (an option I had experimented with last summer). Despite Weebly’s attractive layout and simple usability, I feel that Blogspot better purports sharing, following other blogs, and being a part of an online community. So, off to Blogspot I went. Here is a link to my new and (in some ways) improved, blog:

http://ecoeducatorsvancouver.blogspot.ca/

And lastly, to answer the questions posed in class today:

My learning community consists of teachers and other educators with an interest in environmental education. Whether they have a full out passion or just an inkling of interest, it is my goal to have a blog that is easy to follow and full of great resources, lesson plans, ideas, thoughts, etc that are inspiring and do-able. I want it to be a living, breathing, organism of a blog – where teachers can respond to my posts with posts of their own, and where I can find my way to the blogs of other inspiring teachers. In order to bring people initially to the site, I plan to use the powers that rest quite easily within my hands – the powers of social media. A blog is first. I plan to quickly follow this up with a Facebook site, a Twitter account, an Instagram account, perhaps a Shelfari account – the possibilities are really quite endless.

Regardless of how far I get with this during the next few days, the seed has been planted. Look out world wide web!