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Tired of teaching from the text book? Having a hard time fitting environmental science instruction into the school day? Well EcoKids can change all of that!

EcoKids is a Canadian interactive website created to engage students in environmental activities. This site is full of resources for teachers such as lesson plans, printable resources, and helpful links. It even has specifically designed lessons for ESL (English as a Second Language) students using the different environmental themes. Teachers can access information on Wildlife, Climate Change, Energy, The North, Waste, Land Use, and Earth Day to initiate any environmental or science lesson, or provided a great follow up to an end-of-unit study. This site even has a Fact of the Day that teachers can use to initiate classroom discussions or writing activities about the environment. Looking for an environmental project for your classroom or school? You can visit different links on the site that show different types of environmental projects students and schools are involved in for ideas.

Students can access the site and engage in games to practice what they have learned in the different areas of Wildlife, Climate Change, Energy, the North Pole, and Land Use. The games integrate the environmental themes with reading, math, science, problem solving, and social studies. Students can work on their writing skills by responding to questions posted periodically on the site, or commenting on the blog. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

EcoKids

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Web English Teacher presents this list of travel-based books and their accompanying lesson plans. Most of it is perfect (and required) summer reading and includes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness, among others. The selection of lesson plans for each travel tale contain links to outside sources, including writer biographies, vocab lists and e-notes. There’s even a cool video lesson on Jack Kerouac.

The works featured here all deal with travel, so they make perfect summer excursion books. If your students are traveling, urge them to keep a diary of their own adventures, and compare those stories to the ones here. The reading levels vary from elementary to high school, so there’s something on this list for any student who wants something to read on his travels. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Web English Teacher’s Travel Lit Lesson Plans

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Great Literature, Now With Road Maps

“So how about this weather, huh?”

For your average citizen, that question is at best a clichéd icebreaker. If you’re an earth science or biology teacher, however, it’s often a jump ramp to thrilling topics like hurricanes, ocean levels, and adiabatic heating and cooling. To help you out, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA, because I am not typing that again) has some great educational resources for all grade levels. These tools will let your students do everything from learning about the biological importance of coral reefs to checking out how the National Weather Service alerts people to approaching storms.

My one gripe is that NOAA equates “for kids” with the Comic Sans font, the most obnoxious of all type faces. Their “Primarily for Students” page is also pretty text-heavy, especially for their resources geared toward younger learners. That said, the content itself more than makes up for any graphical deficiencies. And after you check out the materials on the NOAA website, you’ll be able to overcome the conversational deficiencies of folks who lead with, “So how about this weather?” -BILL FERRIS

NOAA Education

When my parents went to school, they ran drills covering what to do in the event of an atomic explosion. We’ve come a long way since then, but nuclear weapons remain a danger. The Global Disarmament Hub wants students to do something about it. That’s why they created Students for a Nuclear Weapons-Free World. If your pupils are concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons, they have a chance to win a trip to the organization’s annual seminar in Geneva.

To enter, students must respond to the question, ”What do you think can lead governments to stay away from, or do away with, nuclear weapons?” They have three options to do so: write a 1500-word essay, produce a 2-5 minute video, or design a poster.

Entries must be received by May 31, so they’d better get started pretty soon (sorry, we just found out about this ourselves). The Students for a NWFW website has lots of links and resources to get your kids started. An essay or poster might be easiest this late in the process. If your students do decide to shoot a video, make sure that “Duck and Cover” isn’t part of their solution. -BILL FERRIS

Students for a Nuclear Weapons-Free World

Photo credit: AlbinoFlea on flickr

Do you like water? I know I do! I’m hooked on the stuff, in fact. Unfortunately, a lot of people die each year due to a lack of clean drinking water. That’s why the Quill and Scroll Society is teaming up with ITT Corporation to sponsor the ITT Award for Excellence in Student Water Journalism. The winner gets a $1000 scholarship, plus an expense-paid trip to World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

Interested students should submit an article addressing a water-related, environmental issue by May 28 (see the award page for complete entry guidelines). If you have any student journalists in your school with a soft spot for the environment, this is right up their alley.

This award is a good way to introduce a discussion on conserving natural resources (in another, more practical way, the $1000 scholarship is also a good way to introduce a discussion on how to pay for a college education). Fortunately, water is a topic everybody can relate to, so your students shouldn’t have too much trouble coming up with an article. -BILL FERRIS

ITT Award for Excellence in Student Water Journalism

Tangentially Related Stuff:
The C. Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence

Photo credit: cobalt123 on flickr

With all the warmth, wind, and low humidity of spring, this is a great time of year to reiterate the importance of fire safety to our students. And who is a better ambassador for this task than Smokey Bear! Yes, the loveable black bear from our childhood has his own website to help relay his important message about fire prevention and natural resource preservation.

Teachers, click the Resources link for K-5 Teacher’s Guides and Lesson Plans on wildfire safety, activity books, and kids posters. Parents and students, check out the Kids link for campfire games, computer simulated smoke jumping, and a way to sign up to get email updates from Smokey himself! Smokey’s site offers a wealth of information presented in a student-friendly manner. Kids can learn Smokey’s important message while having fun and participating in interactive games.

Also, in a rapidly changing world and an ever-growing distance between our children’s learning experiences and our own, it is nice to see this much-loved icon of our youth teaching the nature lovers of the future. Smokey’s a friend that we can all enjoy who will never “extinguish” our desire for fire safety! – DAVID BARGER

SmokeyBear.com

Online tools have greatly increased social and political awareness. Friends can now readily share news, petitions, photographs, meeting information, corporate investment information, and much more with one another.

Scyrve enables those interested in conservation to check out companies’ environmental consciousness via a searchable interface for company profiles that are broken into two areas, Environment and Community. Each area then explains an organization’s environmental ideals in its industry. Each area includes the most important positive and negative aspects of their policies and records. Environmental questions include the extent to which that company recycles, and whether office supplies from are sustainable sources. Community questions such as if employees receive a living wage and health insurance help determine ratings.

A particularly nice feature of Scryve is their downloadable tool lets you know the environmental ratings of companies in real time, displayed discreetly on your desktop. So next time you’re thinking of buying that oil tanker online, check out Shell Oil’s environmental track record, see if they’re worth your support.

Scryve lets you put your green behind companies that take green initiatives seriously! -DAVID BARGER

Scyrve

The Federal Emergency Management Team has a fun and educational site, FEMA for Kids, designed just for youngsters. There are plenty of games and activities, all with the intention of educating and preparing children for potential disasters. Hurricane Katrina might have been a devastating occurrence for many, but we can learn from this disaster nonetheless. That doesn’t mean we should hide underground in bomb shelters, but it does mean knowing what to do in case of emergency.

FEMA does a nice job of creating enough content to keep kids engaged, all the while helping them understand how to be prepared. Most of the activities are online, and include games, quizzes and puzzles. There are even a few offline activities that kids can do at home or in the classroom. Additionally, there are plenty of resources and references for parents and teachers to explore more about FEMA, even a “What’s Happening Now?” map to show FEMA’s efforts across the nation. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

FEMA for Kids

I have always loved this time of year. The days are longer, the birds are singing, and the Narcissus cyclamineus and Prunus cerrulata are beginning to bloom. The what? Why, the daffodils and Japanese cherry trees, of course.

Spring is in the air, and now is the time to encourage your students to identify the native plants around them and maybe even start a garden of their own. Why not direct them to PlantCare.com where the plant encyclopedia has information on over 2,000 plants, including their scientific names, when and where they are in bloom, and how to tend them.

For those students who think gardening is for old ladies in floppy flowery hats hovering over their snap peas, PlantCare.com can show them how varied the world of gardening and gardens is—from seed types to fertilizers to medicinal herbs and state flowers, from Japanese to container to hydroponic gardens, the Web site has it all.

Check it out, and you’ll be one step closer to a green thumb! – DAVID BARGER

PlantCare.com

I never read The DaVinci Code or saw the movie version, but I have a pretty good indication of what it’s all about. If you are a fan of either, then you’ll probably enjoy this Flash cartoon parody that employs talking animals in the roles of their human counterparts.

The BioDaVersity Code is a fun, educational cartoon presented by Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and Global Environment. It uses the structure and basic storyline of The DaVinci Code to explore and explain the effects of the human impact on “The Web of Life.” The animation is wonderful, and the information is presented in such a way that allows any age of student to grasp it, all the while being thoroughly entertained. The film feels unfinished, though, as there is no plot resolution, only a call to viewers to take action into their own hands.

This is easily done with the click on a button titled “Learn More”– taking users to a Flash activity which lets them explore what may be done to alter human impact on the “web of life.” The cartoon itself was produced by Free Range Studios, who also have created such fun and educational films as The Meatrix, and Grocery Store Wars. Those and others can be found here. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

The BioDaVersity Code 

Okay, grade school teachers! Have you been looking for a way to incorporate the importance of environmental stewardship into lesson plans for your younger audiences? Would you be even more interested if I told you that you could be teaching math at the same time? If either of these is true, then today is your lucky day!

Rainforest Maths is a site dedicated to math lessons with an environmental theme for grades K through 6. Kindergartners, for instance, can practice their counting skills by calculating the number of exotically-colored bugs on a tropical leaf, and 5th graders can learn Functions by playing the colorful Frog’s Function machine, a perfect combination of fun and learning.

We all know the importance of the world’s rainforests with their hidden natural medicines and how the majority of the world’s plant and animal species can be found there. Working elements of the rainforest into your everyday lesson plans is a unique opportunity to plant the seed for future care and understanding of this vital resource.

These environmental lessons may be subtle and the math lessons fun, but they open the doors for continued learning and exploration that will benefit your students for a lifetime. -DAVID BARGER

Rainforest Maths

How many of us have been moved into action by the heartbreaking commercials about children in need or a majestic view of pristine waterways being poisoned by industrial waste? In deciding which causes to support, having stark evidence of need at hand helps stir one to action. How about this stark news: In 2004 the US alone used more than 177 million trees for paper—a staggering number that clarifies the waste issue and hopefully inspires a conservationist attitude. On a more personal level, the average cost of wasteful printing is $85 per person per year. You wouldn’t want me reaching into your wallet and stealing $85, would you?

Enter GreenPrint, a software design company that has put together a site to help us better see, through informative lists and graphics, the waste we create with the common desktop printer on a given day. More importantly, they offer a product that can help curb this waste. GreenPrint eliminates wasted document pages - you know, the pages with just a Web address, a legal disclaimer or a banner ad on them - and turns your document into an earth-friendly PDF file that won’t needlessly waste paper or trees. This certainly does not answer all of our issues with paper waste, but every little bit helps and conservation efforts must come from all quarters. GreenPrint can get us off to a good start.

I know I will be much more careful when I hit the print button in the future. Maybe I don’t need those extra copies. Maybe I can read the short report online. Maybe I can share my printouts with my colleagues. What if we were to donate that $85 to organizations that encourage conservation and strategize alternate energies? We would all be richer. – DAVID BARGER

GreenPrint

Inspired by the fresh starts and new beginnings, I usually sit down at the New Year and figure out how to best budget travel time and expense for the coming months. Due to the escalating costs of gas, airfare, and accommodations, I can never go as many places as I want. Although I can always find time for the week at the beach, or the quick getaway to the mountains, some of the more grand destinations always seem to get pushed to “maybe next year.”

Due to the ever-changing nature of our environment, it is becoming clearer that many dream destinations might not have too many “next years” available if human impact is not addressed.

With this in mind, I’ll be sure to incorporate Conservation International’s site of Biodiversity Hotspots into my planning. This site boasts numerous resources for both students and travelers alike, including an interactive hotspot map and a species search guide so I can have a first-hand look at what is threatened where (and why). Most importantly, the site includes information on what I can do to help reverse these destructive trends.

I’ve always wanted to visit Chile, and now that I know that mining, timber extraction, and oil exploration are threatening the yellow-eared parrot and the yellow-tailed wool monkey in the tropical Andes region, that trip to the mountains might just get postponed this year for all the right reasons. – DAVID BARGER

Biodiversity Hotspots

Top 5 Open Source Wiki Engines - Wikis are Web 2.0 incarnate, but they can also seem a bit overwhelming at times. TechCorner gives us these five open source resources for manageable wikis. Be careful of the atrocious grammar in this article though. Too bad the article isn’t a wiki you can edit yourself.

Top 10 Underhyped Webapps - Lifehacker presents these webapps (some of which we’ve touched on here before, including Jott) so you can make your online life as simple as it should be. Some of my favorites include Meebo and Remember the Milk.

11 Tips to Carve Out More Time to Think - Lifehack is the source for life management, and they don’t relent when it comes to bringing great articles like this one to help you deal. These tips include such gems as Walk, Talk, and Type.

50 Inspirational Quotes to Make You Think - via Goal Setting College - While we’re already thinking about thinking, delve into these quotes to give you something to think about. These quotes from such legendary thinkers from history such as Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, and Confucius will have your brain exploding with deep thoughts. Unfortunately, Jack Handy is nowhere to be found.

10 Ways to Green Your Bathroom - Luckily for mother Earth, being green is still in. There are ways we can all do our part to get in on the action, and there are chances to conserve and reduce in almost every area of our lives. Tiny Choices presents these ways you can do your part even when it comes to the nitty-gritty of the grittiest of places - the bathroom. Give one or more of these a try - maybe even recycled toilet paper (not as gross as it might sound). –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

photo via pualv or flickr

You need to talk to your students about Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis. If you don’t, they’ll have to learn about it from the packaging of some cheap plastic toy.

That’s right, paleontologists have found a new dinosaur. This new species is one of the largest carnivorous dinos ever, which is way cooler than if it they’d found an herbivore. These critters apparently roamed Africa 95 million years ago, along with Jurassic Park III star, Spinosaurus, which surely led to some thrilling territorial struggles.

Here’s your chance to use the automatic appeal of huge meat-eating reptiles to lure children into talking about comparatively drier subjects like climate change and geography - with today’s rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, how well would Carcharodontosaurus thrive today? It’s also an excuse to work on pronunciation - any kid who can sound out Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis deserves at least a little extra credit.

The discovery of Carcharodontosaurus is rife with educational opportunities. Don’t blow your chance to incorporate a cool topic like this into your lessons. Because kids shouldn’t learn about paleontology only at the toy store. -BILL FERRIS

New species is one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs ever to have lived via FossilScience.org