Most students, regardless of their grade level, live “in the moment,” concerned only with factors and issues that have an immediate and direct impact on their lives. This is, to a large degree, understandable given the pressures, demands, responsibilities and constraints placed on students during their high school academic years. However, as teachers, we are required to not only
To begin the process of educating my students on my upcoming expedition to Antarctica, I introduced an activity entitled, “Questions about Antarctica…It’s What’s for Dinner.” In this assignment, small groups were asked to develop a list of 10 questions about anything - weather, clothing, wildlife, geography, geology, oceanography - related to Antarctica. Each question was worth up to 10 points
My name is George Hademenos and I am a physics teacher currently in my 17th year at Richardson High School in Richardson, TX. My primary instructional mission as an educator is to ensure that not only are my students exposed to the knowledge, content and lab experiences consistent with a science course, but that they are also
Students in cooperative teams will use a spreadsheet and graphing program such as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to graph and evaluate a large data set. The data sets provided come from authentic arctic ground squirrel research completed at Toolik Research station in arctic Alaska. The data sets were downloaded from body temperature loggers implanted into individual animals
Students in cooperative teams will use a spreadsheet and graphing program such as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to graph and evaluate a large data set. The data sets provided come from authentic arctic ground squirrel research completed at Toolik Research station in arctic Alaska. The data sets were downloaded from body temperature loggers implanted into individual animals
The report is written by teacher participants upon return from their field expedition portion of the PolarTREC program. It summarizes the benefit of the expedition to the teacher, a description of activities, and a summary of how teachers plan to link this experience in classrooms and communities. This is a public document that will be posted in teacher portfolios and
Jeff Peneston, Liverpool High School science teacher and PolarTREC 2008 alumnus was introduced as the New York State Teacher of the Year at an event in the White House Rose Garden that was televised nationally on cable TV. The article describes the awarding of this honor by President Barack Obama at the White House.
As part of a migratory bird study conducted with my bilingual second graders in Washington, DC, the students in my elementary science class spent four weeks getting to know all about birds! We initially focused on birds that migrate from our Mid-Atlantic forests to the tropical forests of Central America (an area where many of them are from)
This lesson came out of a desire to connect the plankton research that I did during the 0902 Healy cruise with my young "researchers" back in Washington, DC. I wanted them to understand that plankton not only feed the Arctic but that much of the world relies on these little critters that come to life for us when we look
This series of three labs challenges students to think about the role of plankton in different ecosystems and waterways in the world. By modeling the research methods of scientists on the Healy icebreaker, students can conduct a small-scale change study to examine reproductive behavior of an isolated type of local plankton.