This American Public Media Educate podcast features PolarTREC alumni, Melissa Lau. She talks about how her experiences in PolarTREC has influenced how she approaches teaching climate change in the classroom. Here's the link to the Education podcast:
Melissa Lau spent a month in the tundra ecosystem gathering data using a device called a Greenseeker. This device measures exactly how green a plant is by calculating its NDVI or Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. In this lesson, students will explore light waves, how they interact with plants, and find out how green is green.
PolarTREC, funded by ARCUS (Arctic Research Consortium of the United States) and the NSF (National Science Foundation), endeavors to connect educators and researchers in real field work experiences. Educators then take that experience back to their learners and community and share their experience in the form of lessons, lectures, and enhanced experiences in the classroom. As
PolarConnect event with teacher Melissa Lau and researchers Jeremy May and Matthew Simon discussing their research on Phenology and Vegetation Change in the Warming Arctic. This presentation was broadcast live from Toolik Field Station, Alaska on 20 June 2018.
This data plotting lesson compares different stratospheric ozone data collected at the South Pole in September 1969, September 1998, September 2008, January 1999, and January 2008. This ozone comparison activity allows students to make conclusions about the annual and seasonal ozone hole as well as overall ozone concentration changes over Antarctica. Students use authentic data collected at the
Given sets of graphable data students will show that various viewpoints can be supported depending on how data is presented and interpreted. These may or may not be accurate or relevant representations of data results over time. This lesson contains basic graphing components, interpretation of information and communication to others of findings depicted in graphs. Teachers may choose
This data plotting lesson is about temperature changes throughout the atmosphere. The data was collected together with the ozone data in January 2008.
The temperature vs. altitude profile allows students to make conclusions about annual and seasonal temperature changes in the atmosphere up to about 35 kilometers in the stratosphere. The best part of this lesson is using