…and now I have to figure out what to do with it 🙂
Thankfully, the WebQuest website comes through with some pretty decent projects and WebQuests to get the ideas flowing. I particularly enjoyed the WebQuest entitled Environmental Awareness. Not a creative name, but it has one of the best engaging “hooks” I’ve ever read. Each student collects all of the junk mail, unsolicited mailers, and other random bits of paper that usually fall out of magazines for one week. At the end of the week all of the “junk paper” will be counted up in order to estimate how much paper is being wasted in the classes’ town based on the results of the classroom. Quite an excellent way to bring the real world into the classroom, and vice versa. It’s also a great way to start a discussion about being environmentally aware and watching An Inconvenient Truth.
For more WebQuests, check out the list of Science-based WebQuests for grade 6-8 (there’s a lot that are appropriate for higher or lower students with adaptation).
For those of you wondering how I got a free copy, I posted about the giveaway back in December. Sadly, the promotion is over, but I’d be willing to share my copy once it’s done making the rounds in my district.
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this goes along great with the site I just recently found.
No Impact Man >
I’m totally loving how he’s going green in NYC.
Many years ago, while producing a series of environmental education documentaries for the National Park Service, I ran into competing Politically Correct agendas. So, I’ve learned to be a bit cautious about popular fads masquerading as ‘truth’ or ‘science’. The two competing PC messages had to do with (1) the ‘One with the Land’ myth surrounding Native American’s relationship with their habitat and the ‘Modern People inevitably spoil the environment’ of our modern culture.
The question raised in the documentary was, “Did the Anasazi use up the trees around them so that they had to travel too far for fuel?” While that fit the ‘man is a defiler’ theory it flew in the face of the ‘One with the Land’ theory. The project was scrapped for PC reasons, not scientific or historic ones.
Today we have the ‘trans fat’ police… who, as it turns out were the ‘animal fat’ police not too many years ago. The result of their past positions juxtaposed with their current onse has left people highly skeptical about nutritionists and the medical community.
I would hate to see this happen to the field of science. And, the fastest way that can happen is to take a popular book at face value without also coming at it with a bit of scientific skepticism over potential exaggerations or ommisions of other factors at play other than simply man’s impact.
I’m not saying not to use the book. But, if I were using it I would also have the students search for alternative SCIENTIFIC (not blogger) challenges to the assertions so that if the predictions of the book fail to materialize they will at least have had the realization that the scientific community is NOT monolithic in its view and that it is, in fact, self-correcting.
Not being critical… just cautious. 🙂
I received notice that I was to get a copy but have yet to see it. Hopefully the fact that you have received yours means mine is on the way.
Rick
One of the most urgent and yet effective way of slowing down the release of CO2 in the admosphere is by effectively protecting forests and coral reefs in nature reserves and protected areas and thus preventing them from going up in CO2 blasting flames. This has been elaborated at my blog and http://www.adopt-a-ranger.org/carbon_offset.htm and http://www.birdlist.org/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=4
Moreover, this would be the only hope of preserving maybe 50% of the species on earth in the course of this century.
To achieve this the world’s shortage of park rangers, estimated at over 100,000 in developing countries needs to be addressed. Currently no government or conservation organization in the world addresses this problem. that is why the Adopt A Ranger Foundation has been created.