Facing the Future: Lessons in Sustainability

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Facing the Future interdisciplinary curriculum provide educators with the educational materials and resources they need to ignite their students’ interest in complex global issues while helping them achieve academically. They have these four goals: • Understand global issues and sustainability in a way that shows the connections between population, environment, consumption, poverty, conflict, and other global issues • Develop a global perspective • Learn critical thinking skills • Be inspired to take personal action

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan

Authors: Facing the Future, Western Washington University

Citizen Science Central

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This site is a gateway to projects involving public participants in real-world research, with hopes of fostering connections for sharing ideas and resources.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Case Study, Diagram/Illustration, Game, Interactive, Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy, Unit of Study

Citizen Science with Zooniverse

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Students learn that ordinary citizens, including students like themselves, can make meaningful contributions to science through the concept of "citizen science." First, students learn some examples of ongoing citizen science projects that are common around the world, such as medical research, medication testing and donating idle computer time to perform scientific calculations. Then they explore Zooniverse, an interactive website that shows how research in areas from marine biology to astronomy leverage the power of the Internet to use the assistance of non-scientists to classify large amounts of data that is unclassifiable by machines for various reasons. To conclude, student groups act as engineering teams to brainstorm projects ideas for their own town that could benefit from community help, then design conceptual interactive websites that could organize and support the projects.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Authors: GK-12 INSIGHT Program,, Paul Cain, Yasche Glass, Jennifer Nider, Sujatha Prakash, Lori Rice

Climate Change and Citizen Science

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This animation describes how citizen observations can document the impact of climate change on plants and animals. It introduces the topic of phenology and data collection, the impact of climate change on phenology, and how individuals can become citizen scientists.

Material Type: Simulation

Keep Calm and Save the Bats!

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In this series of activities, students build their background knowledge about bats through a variety of media and texts (Activity 1), play games to learn more about how bats interact with their prey and how they use their bodies, and choose an action(s) to help make the world a better place for bats, and therefore, humans (Activity 2). My students decided to create educational posters convincing people to help bats, plant a bat garden, build a bat house, and adopt-a-bat. They also wrote persuasive letters to hang the bat house on our school, which they presented to the administration (and the project was approved - in addition to which the principal asked us to create additional educational materials to teach the school community - teachers, students, other staff - and families about the benefits of bats).

Material Type: Unit of Study

Author: Kristin Halverson

Explore Perspectives of A Green & Healthy School

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What does a green AND healthy school look like? Take a good look at your school from these nine different perspectives. Where is your school excelling? Where could your school use some improvements? These pages are written for a student audience with opportunities for them to connect, explore, and engage with the nine focus areas in Green & Healthy Schools Wisconsin: Body & Mind, Community Engagement, Energy, Environmental Literacy, Healthy Buildings, School Grounds, Transportation, Waste, and Water.

Material Type: Learning Task, Reading, Student Guide

Authors: Beth Mittermaier, FIELD Edventures, Kristin Halverson

Sustainable Development Goals Education Materials

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This resource bank has been designed for educators, education planners and practitioners to bring the 17 UN Sustainable DevelopmentGoals into classrooms. It offers hundreds of pedagogical ideas for classroom activities and multimedia resources detailing how best to integrate ESD into teaching and learning, from early childhood care through secondary education.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan

Author: United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)