Crossing Boundaries

consumerism

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

This might be a good source of examples of scientists doing cool work.

An ActionBioscience.org original interview with E.O. Wilson.

An interesting impact of the US on unsustainable resource harvesting in Latin America. Chicle, a primary ingredient in chewing gum is likely depleted in 25-40 years at the current rate.

This site offers video clips, lesson plans, and animations of biological processes.

another one to revisit http://www.teachersdomain.org/ this gives lots more links rather than just life science

This will give you the maps (and all the other birds done in the survey) used in Activity 1: Introduction to Bird Population Trends. Although each link is for the 2000-2005 maps, once you get the bird map you want, there is a link above the map that will give you the 1980-1985 historical map as well.

Animal Diversity Web is an online database of animal natural history, distribution, classification, and conservation biology at the University of Michigan

Information about a variety of animals

"In this 50-question activity, you will determine the best locations to site a wind energy farm in Colorado. You will use GIS as your primary investigative tool and use spatial analysis techniques to consider the best site. You will consider highways, wind speed, cities, size of polygon, contiguity, elevation, federal land, and will perform a number of geoprocessing functions including dissolve, intersect, erase, join, and more to arrive at your conclusion. "

"This module contains an exercise in which students are asked to examine the frequency and distribution of earthquake epicenters and compare these epicenters to the distribution of plate boundaries and cities. Students download earthquake epicenters for the last several days and for an entire year from the Internet, and map the information using ArcView geographic information system (GIS), and analyze the patterns that become evident. The module presents background information on earthquakes and GIS, and includes step-by-step instructions for using the technological tools. This module can be adapted to a wide range of grade levels and may be presented as an introductory GIS exercise. It may be completed without a GIS by using a paper base map, but requires access to the World Wide Web (see Module Overview and Instructor's Notes)."

Kids' Inquiry of Diverse Species by the University of Michigan

Welcome to the Urban Bird Sounds Project! This project will teach you to recognize bird sounds in the city. You can see all these birds in the city of Boston --and maybe in your city also.

"Watch the countries on the map change their size. Instead of land mass, the size of each country will represent the data for that subject --both its share of the total and absolute value."

A recent study reports that high school students who study fewer science topics, but study them in greater depth, have an advantage in college science classes over their peers who study more topics and spend less time on each. The study relates the amount of content covered on a particular topic in high school classes with students' performance in college-level science classes.

"The Dashboard of Sustainability is a free, non-commercial software package that illustrates the complex relationships among economic, social and environmental issues. "

National Geographic BioBlitz

conference on emerging technology applications for online learning

Understand how floods occur, and why floodplains are important to communities, with a case study of Boulder, Colorado, USA.

"In this lesson students examine the patterns of gray whale migration along the Pacific Coast of North America. The exercise provides data at both broad and local scales, providing students with migration patterns and local scale feeding patterns. "