What would your experience curriculum include?

After an excellent event put on by Earthwatch, Why emotion matters in conservation science, it was a pleasure to talk about how we can help young people have an emotional relationship with nature and the especially the ocean.

‘J’ Nichols talked about a project in El Salvador, where every 10 year old releases a baby turtle on the beach. What an amazing experience, for every single 10 year old to have. And there is a buzz in the years beforehand, children anticipating this rite of passage and connection with nature and the ocean.

In discussions on the National Curriculum in England, we put into law what our young people should know. What would happen if we also enshrined in law the experiences that they are entitled to: spend a night in a tent in the wild, visit the sea, attend a service from a different faith background, grow food (and eat it!).

What would your experience curriculum include?

For the research on this, see the Cornell University study showing the link between adult environmentalism and nature experience before the age of 11. Maybe we should start lobbying for mandatory nature walks and camping for primary school pupils rather than climate change in the science or geography curriculum.

Education blog: How can I calculate my footprint?

I have travelled from London to Sydney to join the Catlin Seaview Survey. It promises to be an amazing experience, learning more about the Great Barrier Reef and coral in general.

Over the next three weeks, I shall be visiting different parts of the reef and speaking to the science teams who are investigating the health of this ecosystem.

One of the areas of investigation is how climate change is affecting the reef and the damage that it can cause. Increased CO₂ in the atmosphere affects coral reefs in three main ways:

• warming oceans can cause ‘coral bleaching’ where the symbiotic relationship between coral and algae breaks down, so that the coral loses a major energy source and can die
• climate change is also linked to increased storm activity that causes physical damage to the reef
• more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the oceans, causing ocean acidification and adding to the stress on this fragile environment

It’s a difficult choice. Can I be of benefit to the reef by coming here and helping to communicate its wonders or stay at home and let others do this work?

Can you help in calculating my carbon footprint for this journey so far and if possible compare it to the average annual carbon footprint for the UK?

Here’s how I travelled…

7.5 miles by taxi from my house to Paddington Station

A total of 27 miles by train

10,673 miles by aeroplane from London to Sydney via Singapore

And the last (and nicest) leg by ferry to a part of Sydney called Manly – 7 miles

Awesome Sarah – explorer and educator

We were sad to hear of the extreme weather earlier this year that has delayed  Sarah Outen’s London2London expedition. Sarah had to be rescued by the Japanese Coast Guard after she and her rowing boat were hit by a huge storm in June.

Digital Explorer has been working with Sarah on the education side of things, developing resources and competitions for primary schools and so it was great to read this blog post on her education blog:

Recipe for Adventure Competition: the results

Hello Everyone,

A little while ago we set a competition for L2L Primary Schools to design me a ‘Recipe for Adventure’ – dreaming up a tasty meal that would give me of all the different food groups that I need for adventuring.

London2London HQ received some excellent entries and I have just spent some time getting very hungry and excited at the thought of trying some of the recipes.

Everyone has been spot on in thinking about the food groups I need when I am cycling, or kayaking or rowing – so we have lots of protein for helping me rebuild my muscles, carbohydrates and sugars for giving me energy, vitamins for keeping my skin and gums healthy and all washed down with plenty of water to keep me hydrated.

My favourite entries came from English Martyrs School in Oakham and Mr Kirkland’s Class at Manor School in Didcot. Both schools will receive L2L stickers and some adventuring books, including ‘The Boy who Biked the World’ by Alistair Humprheys and my book ‘ A Dip in the Ocean’. As well as that, I shall be visiting both schools to tell them all about my adventures so far and what treats and surprises I have eaten on the way.

Coming next on the Education Blog…. I shall be sharing some of the stories from my attempt to row across the North Pacific in my boat Gulliver. You may already know – but it didn’t go quite to plan this time.

Happy summer holidays to everyone who is on them already or about to start. Make sure you pack in some adventures!

Cheerio,

Sarah, Nelson, Hercules and Gulliver x

Congratulations to both schools who won.

And sending all our best wishes to Sarah as she prepares to face the challenges of the Pacific again. See this CBBC Newsround clip that really brings home the scale of her ambitions, and do follow her on twitter.

And, Sarah, drop by the Digital Explorer office for a cuppa and a chat next time you’re in town, you’re an inspiration and role model.

EU fishing fleet map

In the middle of making a series of resources on sustainable fisheries for the science and geography classroom and thought that I might have a play again with Ricardo Sgrillo’s excellent free Gooogle Earth tool, GE Graph.

You can easily make your own maps, using world border datasets, such as this one created by Valery35.

Download the Google Earth file, and have a play in your classroom.

What level of taxonomic detail is best?

Creating resources about field science is always difficult. What bits do you include? What do you leave out? Will some of the information distract from the point you are trying to make.

The past couple of days have been spent thinking about how to described zooxanthellae-coral symbiosis for younger teens, without getting all caught up in issues like, ‘Well they’re plant-like, but not a plant…’

Today is all about taxonomic detail and the difficulty of getting it right for a broad age range, say 10-16.

The above image is of the mantle of a giant clam. As a science teacher, which of the following levels would you want including in a resource sheet about the coral ecosystem:

• Kingdom
• Phylum
• Class
• Order
• Family
• Genus
• Species

Is there a ‘right’ level of detail?

Google Earth and the iPad

Lagging behind the curve slightly, we have recently been playing with Google Earth on the new Digital Explorer iPad and it’s a great tool and fun to use.

Of course, some things don’t work. Most of the nice styling that we put into the description balloons gets wiped and some of the formatting goes. YouTube videos that are formatted for HTML5 work but if they’re old and flash-based, then they don’t. We haven’t been able to get screen overlays to work either.

Quick note… if you are looking to download kml files from the web, then you need to do this using the Safari browser rather than any other browser you have installed e.g. Chrome. You’ll then be given the option to open the kml file in Google Earth.

We’ll be looking to develop desktop and mobile/tablet versions of our new sets of Google Earth resources for the coming academic year and hope to find time to spruce up some of the old ones as well.

Sea level rise and Google Earth / Maps

A great day with Priory School yesterday, examining the issue of sea level rise  in the Portsmouth area. We trialled a number of hands-on sessions, which were great fun and will write about these when we have media releases completed to use the photos of students working on the beach.

For now, here are some ideas that were jogged by looking at how ipads might be used to inform a walking tour of a coastal area.

The image below is of a map overlay created in Google Earth, showing the flood cells and sub-cells delineated by the council. Image overlays are fairly easy to create.

The Google Earth file was then saved and uploaded online. Pasting the url of the online file into the search box of Google Maps, allows you to see it as above. Note that you can use Google Maps in Earth mode so that 3D buildings show up and you can tilt the map.

We also created some polygons in Google Earth, again an easy thing to do. The different polygons were given colours and made opaque so that you could see the layers and the underlying imagery. You can see the key to the left below as well.

The ordnance datum in Google Earth and the altitude of the different layers is not quite nuanced enough to show localised flooding predictions on a 25, 50, 100 year timeline and looking to finesse these techniques before sharing more fully, but hope you get the idea.

Gove’s yacht idea, a good one…

This isn’t likely to be the most popular blog post I’ve written, but I believe that in amongst Gove’s idea to buy the Queen a yacht are some genuinely good ideas.

Here’s what happens in my mind…

Before the much scorned memo is circulated, someone at the Department for Education gets hold of it and makes a few minor amendments.

1. The ship is named RV QE2 – yep that’s right, it’s a research vessel

2. The cost of the vessel – proposed £60 million is split between the cost of a research vessel (£30 million) and a national endowment of the other half to run the good ship RV QE2

3. The RV QE2 circumnavigates Britain on an ongoing basis with a rotating crew of scientists, teachers and pupils learning about the oceans

4. The UK becomes the most-aware nation on this blue planet – spinning out great research, ideas and technologies for more sustainable seas

5. HM Queen Elizabeth II launches the ship on behalf of the country for her Diamond Jubilee and calls for a renewed sense of ourselves as an island nation and the value of our marine resources and the importance of the oceans to humanity

In terms of funding, reckon we could get a good lot of private money behind this – not a bad PR opportunity.

But that’s just in my mind. Not a bad idea in itself, just not quite the right focus. Who knows, this idea could have made this country the first in the world to have a floating academy.

Great video on marine plastics

Chris Jordan: Polluting Plastics from PopTech on Vimeo.

A very moving account of the issue of marine plastics by the photographer Chris Jordan. If you haven’t seen his work, take a look at the Running the Numbers series, a emotive take on our attitude to ‘stuff’.

Frozen Oceans resources launch

Very happy to announce the arrival of lots of pretty (and pretty useful)  resources to bring the oceans to life in your classroom! They are available for free online on Digital Explorer’s Ocean channel. The Frozen Oceans resources include booklets with structured lesson plans, activity and experiment sheets, an interactive Media Player with videos and images, along with posters and other related resources- all based on ‘real’ science – the Catlin Arctic Survey expeditions 2009-11. The Ambassador scheme will also without a doubt inspire and educate your pupils – there is nothing better than an Arctic scientist kitted up with full polar gear in a classroom, explaining what its like to live at -40C!

Also have a look at resources on English, Citizenship and RE on the newly launched Culture channel! Here you can watch film episodes from last year’s Journey to Pakistan youth expedition, or book a student Ambassador from the trip to visit your school. All of these resources are designed to increase your pupil’s understanding of other cultures and perspectives through interactive  peer-to-peer education.

Happy exploring!