From the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, this site covers the fascinating areas of archaeology, astronomy, marine biology, biodiversity, genetics and paleontology.

This performance assessment aligns with NGSS Performance Expectation 5.LS2.1 and is intended to be used as an interim assessment. These assessments can either be used summatively, as an end of learning activity, or formatively, utilizing student responses to identify next instructional steps.

 The students will dissect an owl pellet by removing the bones.  They will use the bones to reconstruct the skeletons to help them determine what animals the owl has eaten. The class will compile their results and use their findings to help them construct a food web for the owl.

During this activity, the students will use drag and drop computer code to create an interactive ecological energy pyramid model that shows how the 10% law applies to the energy available at each trophic level. As part of the hour of code, students can use this activity to participate in the Hour of Code week during their biology class. This lesson plan results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

Provides a comprehensive introduction to key issues and findings in object recognition in experimental, neural, computational, and applied domains. Emphasizes the problem of representation, exploring the issue of how 3-D objects should be encoded so as to efficiently recognize them from 2-D images. Second half focuses on face recognition, an ecologically important instance of the general object recognition problem. Describes experimental studies of human face recognition performance and recent attempts to mimic this ability in artificial computational systems.

Developed by the World Affairs Council of Seattle, this teaching and learning module provides a series of lessons that engage students in exploring the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. With 17 goals in total, this ambitious framework targets local and global issues ranging from ensuring quality education for all to mitigating climate change. This set of lessons has student facing materials translated into Spanish. .Desarrollado por el Consejo de Asuntos Mundiales de Seattle, este módulo didáctico proporciona una serie de lecciones que involucran a los estudiantes en la exploración de los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible de las Naciones Unidas. Con un total de 17 objetivos, este marco ambicioso apunta a problemas locales y globales que van desde garantizar una educación de calidad para todos hasta mitigar el cambio climático.

In this series of activities, students observe and sketch the environment outside their school using their senses. Students create a classroom book using one of their sketches.

This video segment produced for Teachers' Domain features a time-lapse video of clouds forming, changing, and moving across the sky.

Learn how snowfall happening later in the year than usual is impacting cultural practices in this video segment about climate change adapted from the College of Menominee Nation.

In this video segment adapted from the College of Menominee Nation, tribal members observe lower water levels in lakes and streams and call for global, collaborative solutions to address climate change.

This series of activities uses the Rio Grande ecosystem to promote systems thinking. The concepts for the activities were developed during the Earth Educators' Rendezvous in 2015. Activities E1-E3 were developed by Diane Doser at the University of Texas at El Paso for in-class and homework assignments for a large section of "Introduction to Environmental Science" for college freshman who are primarily non-science majors. The activities revolve around the middle Rio Grande ecosystem near El Paso, Texas. Activities M1-M3 were developed by Gary Weissman at the University of New Mexico as a series of in-class and field activities associated with a lower division course for environmental science majors. This series of activities explores systems thinking as associated with the Middle Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico. All activities were designed with multicontext diversity in mind, where some activities tap into 'higher' context approaches and others tap into 'lower' context approaches to understanding a system (see Ibarra 2001 for more details or http://serc.carleton.edu/earth_rendezvous/2016/program/morning_workshops/w7/index.html for workshop information from the Earth Educators' Rendezvous 2016 on this approach to diversity). We also take a place based approach, focusing on the local Rio Grande ecosystem, since place based learning has been shown to aid diverse students in understanding course material (Semken, 2005).

We believe these assignments could be adapted for other settings by having the students observe any local ecosystem that they are familiar with such as a nearby river or stream, forest, meadow, sea shore or lake shore or urban park.

Keywords: system thinking, Rio Grande ecosystem, biogeochemical cycles, multicontextual diversity, place based learning, jigsaw activities

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A short video on the causes of ocean acidification and its effects on marine ecosystems.

This simulation allows students to explore the change in sea surface pH levels with increasing CO2 levels.

In this curriculum module, students in high school life science, marine science, and/or chemistry courses act as interdisciplinary scientists and delegates to investigate how the changing carbon cycle will affect the oceans along with their integral populations.

The oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and play a critical role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide through the interaction of physical, chemical, and biological processes. As a result of anthropogenic activity, a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration (to 760 ppm) is expected to occur by the end of this century. A quarter of the total CO2 emitted has already been absorbed by the surface oceans, changing the marine carbonate system, resulting in a decrease in pH, a change in carbonate-ion concentrations, and a change in the speciation of macro and micronutrients. The shift in the carbonate system is already drastically affecting biological processes in the oceans and is predicted to have major consequences on carbon export to the deep ocean with reverberating effects on atmospheric CO2. Put in simple terms, ocean acidification is a complex phenomenon with complex consequences. Understanding complexity and the impact of ocean acidification requires systems thinking – both in research and in education. Scientific advancement will help us better understand the problem and devise more effective solutions, but executing these solutions will require widespread public participation to mitigate this global problem.

Through these lessons, students closely model what is occurring in laboratories worldwide and at Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) through Monica Orellana’s research to analyze the effect CO2 has on ocean chemistry, ecosystems and human societies. Students experiment, analyze public data, and prepare for a mock summit to address concerns. Student groups represent key “interest groups” and design two experiments to observe the effects of CO2 on seawater pH, diatom growth, algal blooms, nutrient availability, and/or shell dissolution.

“Ocean Acidification, Imminent Mass Extinction?” is a unit for an Earth, Physical, or Environmental Science classroom. This unit is easily included in larger curricula focusing on climate change, the carbon cycle, human impact on Earth, or ocean chemistry. A backdrop for the unit is that ocean acidification may be jeopardizing global primary production because phytoplankton are being forced to adapt to a lower and lower pH. Loss of this piece of the food web has the potential to collapse massive, if not the most massive, ecosystems, hence mass extinction. Past mass extinction events are briefly discussed.

The unit begins by presenting the phenomenon of an ocean pH that is changing and then delves into the chemistry behind the change. The unit also considers the biological consequences of an ocean that is more acidic than it had been in millennia. Furthermore, implications to global carbon cycling are considered as the planet relies on microscopic ocean creatures to sequester carbon and transport it into long term storage. Lastly, the unit presents some recent research into the effects of the increased ocean acidity on an array of different organisms. Student activities are focused on hands on demonstrations that help students gain an understanding of pH; how pH is affected by carbon dioxide; and how shells are vulnerable to acidic conditons.

This NOAA video discusses how the ocean absorbs the increased amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, thereby changing the pH and buffering action of the ocean. These changes in pH are impacting calcifying organisms, such as corals and shellfish, and related food chains and ecosystems.

This activity is designed to be used as a jigsaw. Although each component could be individually used as desired. The activity is meant to be conducted in a three-phase approach.

Phase 1 involves small groups of "experts" focusing on one of our narrow topics related to ocean acidification. Students work together, using the Internet as necessary, to complete a short 10-15 minute activity while the instructor roams the room to clarify issues that arise.

Phase 2 involves small groups made up of one "expert" from each of the expert groups. This interdisciplinary group will work through a short 10-15 minute activity that encompasses the knowledge from each of the "experts" while the instructor roams the room to clarify issues that arise.

Phase 3 involves the entire class as a whole and to discuss and reflect upon the findings from each interdisciplinary group. The instructor leads this discussion.

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This model of ocean-atmosphere interaction shows how carbon dioxide gas diffuses into water, causing the water to become more acidic. The video demonstration and instruction provide an explanation of the chemistry behind this change and the consequences of ocean acidification. The video also addresses a misconception about how ocean acidification affects shelled organisms.

This activity is a Google Slides playlist that will introduce fluctuations in thermohaline circulation, and potential impacts of changes in these patterns. This playlist is suitable for use in remote, hybrid, or in-person instruction and can easily be added to a Learning Management System.

Provenance: Molly Ludwick, Kings Mountain Middle School
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)