Comprehensive Collections
All have established a national presence for rich resources in Environmental Education...
Links
612-641-2855
All have established a national presence for rich resources in Environmental Education. NASA maintains a repository of projects with outstanding photo images, rarely available from another source. This agency has formed cooperative agreements with many school districts for special projects, both on earth and in space. Satellite technology is used to broadcast "Live From the Stratosphere" with varying topics monthly, such as images from Hubble. If you add/antarctica2 to the above URL, you can join an expedition to Antarctica, complete with images, sound, exchanges and activities. You can also order a teacher's guide. This particular project is also sponsored by PBS and the Office of Polar Projects. As a direct result of student interest, Hubble will deliver images and data about Pluto and Neptune free to the K12 community. Recently, a targeted project for career exploration for young women has been showcased;it will be enriched, beginning in October 97. Watch for events celebrating National Astronomy Week and with JPL news. NASA also maintains its own television cable channel NTV.Quest adapts its offerings to real events in the sky. For instance, as the Mars mission shifts its focus, so will the NASA educational programs. Check this site a few times a year so your classwork will match what's happening.
At Utah State University (usu)is an exemplar of a regional NASA educational resource center. Seek at Minnesota coordinates all the repositories for weather in Minnesota and could be replicated by other states. The site at the University of Michigan houses the North American Association for Environmental Education, while the above telephone is for the Center for Global Environmental Education at Hamline University in St.Paul (1536 Hewitt Avenue, St. Paul MN 55104). North American Association for Environmental Education has enriched its site recently. At the Kaos site in Australia resides the largest collection of links in environmental education around the world. Many of the other resources in this library are logged and organized here, too. A map is available for searching by regions of the world or topic. (URL note: between "other" and "servers" is an underscore if you don't jump to this site from here.)
Ecozoic at UToronto, on the other hand, is targeted to secondary students. Its primary purpose is to infuse or integrate environmental education into traditional subject matters--a valuable contribution since secondary students rarely participate in cross-disciplinary projects. The set of lessons is quite extensive and may stir ideas for like topics.
Planet Earth, co-sponsored by the Museum of Television and Radio (old technologies perhaps), illustrates one of the best uses of new technologies, such as video-conferencing. The strands include environmental treasures, you make a difference (a single issue), and conflict resolution via a WebQuest (wolves in Yellowstone Park) (From the school district page, click on teaching and learning to pull up Planet Earth)
Environmental Education Link has been re-organized into the categories of classroom project data, professional resources, targeted grants, databases and dedicated organizations.
Dramatic evidence of changes in the composition of freshwater bodies has been attributed to climatic warming. 26 researchers issued a wake-up call.
Encyclopedia of Earth is a specialized search engine, including primary sources such as Darwin's writings.
Annotation
The major advantage of connecting to such national centers is that you can locate and select projects from a large repository which meets your local classroom needs within your curriculum structure. Your class, in turn, could develop a telecommunications project of its own and relay it to these centers.
For the NASA/JPL and other space expeditions the search for the origin of life is a primary goal. And now we have learned that water--not photosynthesis--is the key seedbed. What will we learn in the next century?
