What is Ocean Voyagers?

Ocean Voyagers Home Site: http://voyager.snc.edu

The Ocean Voyagers program is a middle school teacher preservice/inservice training system featuring integrated curriculum development, World Wide Web page construction and maintenance, and teachers-to-sea experiences. It works to place marine and ocean studies into a broad curricular context using, literature, music, the arts, history, geography, or economics to provide students with personally meaningful points of access to oceanographic studies.

St. Norbert College (SNC), home of the Ocean Voyagers program, has successfully collaborated with numerous partners to enhance educational opportunities in the sciences and technology. Such collaborative projects include a NASA University Joint Venture (JOVE) grant to assess habitat quality with satellite imagery, and a National Science Foundation Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement grant for aquatic science equipment. SNC is a member of the TRITON Network, a distance education consortium linking the College with three community college campuses and nine rural school districts, to provide high-quality videoconferencing technology to dispersed education populations.

The Ocean Voyagers Program is designed to facilitate broad-based oceanographic education through a World Wide Web (WWW) site, direct contact with the Navy's fleet of survey ships and other resources, professional growth opportunities for middle school teachers, teachers-to-sea programs, and integrated curriculum development, coordination, and dissemination. The recently completed $9 million Bemis International Center, a state-of-the-art teaching and conference facility, will assist in the implementation of the Ocean Voyagers program through its three computer laboratories, six interactive multimedia classrooms, and a similarly-equipped fully-interactive auditorium.

In the past two years, SNC developed a partnership with the Office of the Oceanographer of the Navy and the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command (NMOC) to develop the Adopt-A-Ship Program in 1995-96, an outreach initiative with roots in the Navy's/National Geographic Society's (NGS) Project Marco Polo. The Ocean Voyagers program is a national multi-faceted expansion of this program which maximizes access to and utility of information from U.S. Navy oceanographic survey ships.