This series of informative graphics provide a regional overview of US energy resources.
Introduces the ethical dimension of finding, using, and sharing images in the context of the undergraduate research assignment. Students will understand the ethical aspects of finding, using, and sharing images; will engage with copyright issues and concepts of intellectual property; and will find and analyze specific images as examples.
When conversations of racial injustice and equity arise, many educators find themselves reacting in the moment. In this one-hour webinar, a panel of experts discuss how teachers can analyze and evaluate media to provide important context for students and support anti-racist classroom planning and practices. Teachers can also find advice for using media literacy tools to empower students and inform their personal practice.
In this resource, students learn about freshwater resources, how NASA uses satellites to measure precipitation, and how that data can be used in agricultural practices. Students use data from the NASA Global Precipitation Measurement satellite to explore precipitation patterns in two parts of the world and then make recommendations for how to reduce water use in agriculture and in their own lives.
The following motion picture analysis worksheet was designed and developed by the Education Staff of the National Archives and Records Administration. You may find this worksheet useful as you introduce students to motion pictures as primary sources of historical, cultural, social and scientific information.
The following motion picture analysis worksheet was designed and developed by the Education Staff of the National Archives and Records Administration. You may find this worksheet useful as you introduce students to motion pictures as primary sources of historical, cultural, social and scientific information.
This is a ten-question quiz of basic to intermediate information about global climate change.
This take-home final exam asks students to demonstrate their improved skills in searching for sources (information literacy) and writing on freshwater science/society/policy intersections (science literacy), and author an essay themed on Water Optimism.
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This classroom demonstration illustrates the amount of water stored in various parts of the Earth system in a straightforward manner. Students estimate the proportions of water in the oceans, icecaps and glaciers, groundwater, freshwater lakes, inland seas, soil moisture, atmosphere, and rivers. Then they fill beakers with the actual proportion and discuss what elements of the activity were surprising to them. Information on flash floods and flood preparedness and safety are included.
Students are introduced to some essential meteorology concepts so they more fully understand the impact of meteorological activity on air pollution control and prevention. First, they develop an understanding of the magnitude and importance of air pressure. Next, they build a simple aneroid barometer to understand how air pressure information is related to weather prediction. Then, students explore the concept of relative humidity and its connection to weather prediction. Finally, students learn about air convection currents and temperature inversions. In an associated literacy activity, students learn how scientific terms are formed using Latin and Greek roots, prefixes and suffixes, and are introduced to the role played by metaphor in language development. Note: Some of these activities can be conducted simultaneously with the air quality activity (What Color Is Your Air Today?) of Air Pollution unit, Lesson 1.
This is an unabashedly practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly.
We will show you how to use date filters to find the source of viral content, how to assess the reputation of a scientific journal in less than five seconds, and how to see if a tweet is really from the famous person you think it is or from an impostor.
We’ll show you how to find pages that have been deleted, figure out who paid for the web site you’re looking at, and whether the weather portrayed in that viral video actual matches the weather in that location on that day. We’ll show you how to check a Wikipedia page for recent vandalism, and how to search the text of almost any printed book to verify a quote. We’ll teach you to parse URLs and scan search result blurbs so that you are more likely to get to the right result on the first click. And we’ll show you how to avoid baking confirmation bias into your search terms.
The web gives us many strategies and tactics and tools, which, properly used, can get students closer to the truth of a statement or image within seconds. For some reason we have decided not to teach students these specific techniques. As many people have noted, the web is both the largest propaganda machine ever created and the most amazing fact-checking tool ever invented. But if we haven't taught our students those capabilities is it any surprise that propaganda is winning?
This is an unabashedly practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly.
This activity examines the impacts of hurricanes and storm surges on coastal communities.
Professor Kate Rushin describes the Harlem Renaissance as a large social and cultural movement fueled by many factors in this video from A Walk Through Harlem.
In this activity students trace the sources of their electricity, heating and cooling, and other components of their energy use though the use of their family's utility bills and information from utility and government websites.
In this learning activity, students analyze various sources of information to determine the best location for a new wind farm.
This is a utility-scale, land-based map of the mean annual wind speed 80 meters above the ground. This map can be used to evaluate the potential for wind energy in the US. State maps and more information are linked from the main map.
A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading develops and enacts the mindful reading pedagogy described in Ellen C. Carillo's scholarly monograph Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (Utah State UP). Offering a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction by focusing on reading and writing, A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading supports students as they become more reflective, deliberate, and mindful readers and writers by working within a metacognitive framework. The reading selections, assignments, and activities in this innovative textbook move students toward this goal by providing opportunities to apply and reflect on multiple ways of reading and writing, positioning students to develop a metacognitive awareness crucial to transferring what they learn about reading and writing to other courses and contexts. Because many of the difficulties that students encounter when writing are related to the difficulties posed by reading complex texts, A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading gives instructors the tools to help students develop a repertoire of reading strategies that will help them become stronger readers and—by extension—stronger writers.
FreeReading is an open source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. FreeReading contains Writing Activities, a page of activities to address important writing skills and strategies.
This opening assignment for an introductory quantitative reasoning course asks students to write about "Numbers We Should Know." Its goal is to help students begin to think quantitatively, evaluate the sources of quantitative information critically, and write using numbers precisely and thoughtfully.