BOARDMAN, Ohio—For residents of Ohio, Lake Erie is a treasured natural resource. It's the warmest and most biologically productive of the Great Lakes. Protecting and enhancing the lake is a goal taken seriously by local scientists, politicians, park rangers, and—for the last few years—by middle-school students from the suburban community of Boardman.

In order to immerse her students in what she calls "discovery learning," teacher Joyce Zitkovich, a specialist in gifted education, combines lakeside adventures with the use of technology for gathering data. "Our goal is not only to explore the lake and the impact of people, but to better understand how experiential learning, human initiative, and digital tools can help us increase our appreciation for and connection to our natural resources," she explains.

Geneva State Park, located about 70 miles north of Boardman on Ohio's northeastern shore of Lake Erie, is the departure point for the watery adventure. Zitkovich brings a "scout team" of 24 fifth- and sixth-graders from two Boardman schools—Center Middle School and Glenwood Middle School. The scouts are students who've been identified as gifted. Back at their two home schools, another 350 students also participate by receiving and logging data in the computer labs.

At the lake, students rotate through several workstations, assisted by professionals who specialize in environmental science or technology. The stations include:

• Microbiology lab where plankton is collected, viewed under microscopes and a bioscope, then photographed with a digital camera
• Beach cleanup area, where students collect refuse articles, sort them into categories, then photograph the sorted groups using digital cameras
• Water sensor lab where students use handheld computers with sensor interface tools to collect chemical readings of the water
• Shoreline survey where students log their observations
• Global positioning activity where student groups create scavenger hunts using environmental clues
• COMM-Center where students use laptop computers to e-mail their digital data back to students in the home school computer labs

Students also work with licensed ham radio operators to relay weather reports back to the school computer labs.

Tasks are challenging and don't always go smoothly, but that's all part of the learning curve. Zitkovich's classroom practices are grounded in the work of Vygotsy, who described what he called the Zone of Proximal Development. Explains Zitkovich: "Simply, it's allowing students to be in a situation where they know some basics, but need assistance from others to complete tasks."

Throughout the day when fieldwork occurs, she says, "there's gentle grumbling when everything doesn't turn out as expected: The images did not turn out as they liked, and had to be retaken. Laptops crashed. Dial-up connections took a long time (the site is too remote for high-speed Internet connections). Phone lines were outdated. Uploading images to Web pages didn't work." At every obstacle, she says, "students wanted to know why? Being 'in the zone' is not easily explained. Still, they went away feeling that they'd truly worked hard at getting a job completed well."

Sometimes, unexpected events lead to welcome surprises. One group of students, for instance, learned that a boater in the middle of Lake Erie had been listening on his ham radio while they took weather readings. "He contacted them to let them know that all of their weather reports were very precise and that he was impressed with what they were doing. That was a great thrill!"

Although Zitkovich specializes in teaching gifted students, she enjoys the opportunity this project offers to extend enrichment to a larger group of learners. This requires team planning and coordination with regular classroom teachers in science, language arts, and computer technology, along with a group of professionals from the scientific community. Park rangers at Geneva State Park are helpful as well, and a telecommunications company provides the four phone lines used to bring Internet access to the water's edge. "Many people have helped in large and small ways. This is truly a beautiful team effort," she says.

For the experiential learning event, four laptops are connected via dial-up modems to the school district server. In addition, students use handheld computers with interface tools. Each of the home schools also has its own networked computer lab, which the scout team uses later to create a Web page about their research project.

For Zitkovich, Our Lake Online Project offers a way to combine her passions for environmental science and using technology in education. "I don't recall ever having learned so much about the environment as I have in the past three years," she says.

Surprisingly, when she dove into designing the project four years ago, she had no technology background, experience, or training. "I went forward simply driven by what I envisioned students doing in an outdoor learning situation." And she and her students have been in the zone ever since.