2026 LEEF Conference Wakulla Wild

Environmental education faces critical challenges in keeping pace with rapidly evolving technological landscapes. AI offers support in planning, content creation, evaluation, and teaching, creating opportunities for innovative and timely content to engage students. This session introduces ways environmental educators can integrate AI into their practice through hands-on activities with various AI tools, while addressing ethical considerations. Participants will gain practical skills to critically apply AI for lesson planning, content development, assessment, and instruction, fostering innovation in the field of environmental education.

This presentation will discuss the use of digital technologies at the University of South Florida Libraries to transform archives from the Florida Environment and Natural History (FLENH) collections into openly accessible resources for educational purposes. The presentation will highlight an approach to digital curation that centers educators and researchers as the key audience. Rooted in strategic archival acquisitions and explored through educator-led partnerships, the team has developed an online repository with more than 74,000 records. This presentation will describe our workflow and openly accessible resource, as well as three key outputs that might be immediately useful to Florida educators. First, the Tampa Through Time Portal is a place-based interactive mapping portal that provides new ways to explore digitized FLENH materials. The ekphrastic Creekshed project, hosted by USF Libraries, uses FLENH archives to inspire local authors and students to write creative works grounded in the local watershed. Finally, the Botanical Gardens 360 Tours and USF Greenways map illustrate new approaches to capturing environmental spaces and pairing them with historic documents to produce immersive contemporary tours.

This lightning presentation highlights a project from the 2025 Civic-Environmental Education (CEE) Change Fellowship of the North American Association of Environmental Educators (NAAEE). The project aims to provide professional development workshops that integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge into environmental education with the support of AI tools for environmental educators in Africa. Lessons learned from these international workshops will offer valuable insights into professional development for educators in Florida and beyond.

As environmentalists, our goal is to engage in activities that improve the well-being of the environment and promote the conservation and preservation of natural resources.  If environmentalists use AI, it raises important questions about whether this use aligns with their ecological values. Using correlation and regression analysis, I investigated how the ecological values of environmentalists influence their use of AI. Results will answer the question: “How environmentalists’ perceived usefulness of AI and their familiarity with AI's environmental impacts predictive factors of their AI usage?”.