Wayne students use All Things Nebraska for classroom projects

The website All Things Nebraska, created by Nebraska Extension, houses thousands of mappable data points about the Cornhusker State. While it was designed for business professionals, government officials, researchers and extension educators, recently the website found a new audience — elementary school students at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Wayne.

Barb Hochstein, the third, fourth, fifth and sixth grade teacher at the school, learned about All Things Nebraska at an extension board meeting for Wayne and Pierce counties, where Julie Schultz, 4-H development extension educator, introduced the platform. Knowing the Nebraska studies unit was coming up soon for her class, Hochstein explored the site on her own to see if it could be a useful resource.

“The maps and graphs were huge — I mean, the kids really got into the maps,” Hochstein said. “Being able to relate to their own state and what’s going on is really important, and that’s what we did. We spent probably three whole days simply using All Things Nebraska, where we just played around with it.”

Nebraska Studies is a required unit for Nebraska fourth graders. Students pick a topic — such as the government, water resources or cattle production — conduct research and create a presentation. Hochstein’s students held an open-house-style exhibit that they called the “Nebraska Museum.”

Having heard about the students’ use of All Things Nebraska, Schultz attended the exhibit.

“I’m walking around, and there’s this huge tri-fold poster about All Things Nebraska, and how they utilized it, and how they looked it up and how extension helped connect them to their Nebraska resources and facts,” Schultz said.

In addition to the posters, each student explained their research to visitors, Schultz said, and was excited to share what they learned from the website. Some posters focused on statewide subjects — Kool-Aid, Reuben sandwiches, the Bessey Ranger District or famous Nebraskans — while others narrowed down to Wayne County, exploring population, socioeconomics and other census-driven data.

What caught Hochstein’s attention during the unit was how quickly her students learned to navigate the site and became invested in the maps. In addition to county report cards and the interactive Rural Poll report, All Things Nebraska includes a customizable creator space where users can look up more than 30,000 data points and see selected information displayed on a map of the state.

“The youth of today are so technologically based that this was just a simple resource for them,” Schultz said. “They didn’t have to think twice about it. When I was a fourth grader, we didn’t think twice about going to grab the encyclopedia. These kids don’t have to worry about that. All Things Nebraska had it all for them right there.”

Katie Larson, a Nebraska Extension educator who oversees All Things Nebraska, said the website is designed to be visual, easy to use and relatable to all ages.

“They can look up information about their county or, when you get into certain maps, even their ZIP code,” she said. They latch onto that because it’s that personal connection to the data.”

One student found a map about tar spot disease in corn and said he couldn’t wait to go home and tell his parents about it. Another student discovered a map of wildfires from the past two years and shared how they impacted people in those areas.

Hochstein has taught elementary school for 35 years, the past five at St. Mary’s, and said the biggest difference between the presentations from this year’s students versus previous years were the multiple All Things Nebraska maps, graphs and charts on project posters.

“There were several times that my kids would ask to get on All Things Nebraska on their own time,” Hochstein said. “I think they latched onto this because it was something new, but it also applied to Nebraska. And it was a safe site for kids to be on.”

What the students learned from the website extended beyond their presentations. As Hochstein introduced them to the site, they looked up information on dairy production in Nebraska. Toward the end of the school year, they took a field trip to a dairy farm west of Wayne, and the students told the dairy farmers everything they had learned from the maps and charts they had discovered on the website.

Hochstein said she plans to use the site again next year when she teaches the Nebraska studies unit. She is grateful that it comes up only once per year, because it will give her more time to become comfortable using the site, too.

For Larson, knowing that youth are using the site has spurred her to think differently about how to make the data even more accessible.

“I never anticipated that a classroom would pick up on it and just run with it,” she said. “It’s awesome that they’ve done this, and I hope there’s more. I hope there’s a possibility of putting some actual curriculum from Nebraska Extension around All Things Nebraska for youth.”

For more information about All Things Nebraska, contact Larson at katelyn.pleskac@unl.edu or visit the All Things Nebraska website.