PALO ALTO, California—Across the Northern Hemisphere, this is the season for spring fever. The longer hours of daylight and warm breezes coax us outdoors, inspiring poets and turning young hearts to folly. In locations across North America and Europe, however, students are taking the season seriously. For them, the arrival of spring marks the culmination of a yearlong scientific project.

For nearly a decade, Lucinda Surber's fourth-graders at Barron Park Elementary School have been participating in a global project sponsored by Journey North (www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/tulips*). Students living at different latitudes track the arrival of spring by observing when carefully planted tulips burst into bloom. They use online data forms to report their scientific observations, and also receive online updates from participating schools around the world.

Barron Park is one of 13 official Journey North gardens, along with schools in Newport-on-Tay, Scotland; Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Bamberg, Germany; and Utsjoki, Finland. By collecting observations at the same locations year after year, the schools have created a databank that can be used to compare the pace of spring's arrival in different years.

The tulip project allows students to observe that spring advances north like a wave. Surber explains, "It can be hard for fourth-graders to understand how change happens over time." This project brings that lesson home. Students use information reported by other locations to plot data onto world maps. When students in Kingwood, Texas, report their first sighting of green shoots, for instance, Surber's students make a green dot on their map, at the precise latitude and longitude of Kingwood. Later, when the Texans report observing their first tulip in bloom, Surber's students draw a red dot on Texas. "On the maps, they can see the gradual movement from green to red," Surber explains, as spring makes its way north.

They also gain a better understanding of world geography. When emails begin arriving with tulip reports from the around the globe, Surber's students "are plotting 10 sites a week. They get quite excited when they start getting data," she adds.

Although Surber weaves a variety of learning opportunities into the yearlong project, she's careful to have her students participate in three key events that all Journey North schools share:

• Planting the bulbs (all schools plant the same kind of tulips, at the same depth)
• Noting when first green growth emerges
• Noting when first blooms open

The precision of those events offers a good lesson in how to design a scientific investigation. Surber also integrates lessons on prediction and measurement. Students weigh and measure each bulb, recording their data. Each student predicts when her tulip bloom will emerge, in relation to others planted by students in the same class.

Students learn about botany by dissecting bulbs and making scientific drawings. "That's so important because, once they plant the bulbs, everything happens underground. They can't see what's going on," Surber says.

They also gain practical lessons in problem solving. Although Palo Alto is located in California's Silicon Valley, the Barron Park neighborhood has retained an almost rural quality. "Our school sits right near a creek. We're right in the squirrels' backyard," Surber says. One afternoon, students looked out the window and saw "a herd of squirrels digging up our planter box." They devised a chicken wire barrier to keep their flower bulbs safe.

The tulip project combines technology with hands-on learning, giving fourth-graders a variety of experiences for learning. Surber has been integrating technology in similar ways ever since she started teaching 18 years ago. "I've been using computers since day one," she says. "At first, it was mainly for typing and word processing, but the Internet has really opened up possibilities." Her class Web site (http://www.barron.palo-alto.ca.us/surber/surber.html*) is loaded with examples of innovative projects the integrate technology.

These days, she uses classroom technology as a communications tool, for student research, for student publishing, and for multimedia projects. "We exchange a lot of information with other classes," she says, which helps her students make connections across cultures and at great distances. Surber also appreciates the power of technology for helping students improve as writers. "One of the hardest things is getting kids to revise and rewrite. Computers take out the drudgery of revising. You don't have to retype or erase. A student can sit with a peer editor, talk about suggestions, and revise on the spot." Desktop publishing applications allow students to polish their work so that it looks professional, and then share it with an audience.

Although self-taught in using technology for teaching, Surber has become a tech leader for her district. She trains colleagues in using technology and maintains a variety of Web sites. She also receives many inquiries from other teachers who have come across her Web site and want more information. "I get a lot of email from first-year teachers," she says. "They'll write to ask, tell me more about your math project." And she does, of course. "It's fun to mentor people I've never met."