The New England Aquarium provides in-depth educational resources and activities for teachers, parents, kids and adult learners. Visit, learn and explore all the Aquarium has to offer!
The Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) enables Maine students to use scientific tools and methods to investigate the state's fresh and saltwater ecosystems. GMRI uses communications and computing technology to create authentic, hands-on research experiences for students and link them with world-class scientists. Their programs bring students into a working research laboratory, take them out into the field to collect scientific data about their local waterways, and enable them to use the Internet to share their observations and explore new marine science topics.
The NOAA Education website was designed for the teacher to use in the classroom or as background reference material, for weather, climate, oceans, satellites, and space.
Since 2003, the College of Exploration has offered online virtual teacher workshops on ocean exploration conducted with the support of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's, Office of Ocean Exploration. These short one, two and three week programs bring exciting topics to your classroom with a special focus on efforts currently underway to protect and conserve special places in the ocean and explore still unknown areas of the deep ocean.
Discovery of Sound in the Sea explores the science of sound through informational and audio resources. This website describes how people use sound to execute underwater measurements and research, how marine animals use and are affected by sound, and it also provides teacher resources such as classroom activities, feature sounds, and other useful activities.
The Fragile Fringe: A Guide for Teaching About Coastal Wetlands is intended to provide a basis from which a comprehensive study of coastal wetlands can be developed by teachers for their classrooms. This guide provides lessons about wetlands including where they should be located, the importance of the Mississippi River, beneficial functions of wetlands, barrier islands as part of wetlands, loss of wetlands to subsidence, and loss of wetlands to gas and oil exploration.
The Water Sourcebooks from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency contain 324 activities for grades K-12 divided into four sections: K-2, 3-5, 5-8, and 9-12. Each section is divided into five chapters: Introduction to Water, Drinking Water and Wastewater Treatment, Surface Water Resources, Ground Water Resources, and Wetlands and Coastal Waters.
Project Oceanica's goal is to integrate education with oceanographic research and exploration, and to develop educational resources and programs for college and high school students and K-12 educators.
NOAA Ocean Explorer is an educational website for virtual exploration of the ocean realm. It provides public access to current information on a series of NOAA scientific and educational explorations and activities in the marine environment. Users can follow explorations in near real-time, learn about exploration technologies, observe remote marine flora and fauna in the colorful multimedia gallery, read about NOAA’s 200-year history of ocean exploration, and discover additional NOAA resources in a virtual library. The Education section provides direct access to standards-based lesson plans and professional development opportunities for educators.
The University of New Hampshire's Coastal Ocean Observing Center is a system for monitoring the linked oceanic and estuarine ecosystem in our region. This monitoring system has the capability to detect changes in the ecosystem across multiple physical and trophic levels. The Center offers many education resources for download and an improved data access tool for obtaining buoy, boat, and satellite data.
Registry of Science Outreach Volunteers (ROV) - a partnership of schools, scientific institutions, businesses, and community resources, whose purpose is to support, promote, and expand science and technology education and science literacy in the participating Massachusetts communities of Falmouth, Mashpee and Bourne. The purpose of the ROV is to help local teachers and students connect with researchers or others in the community who have scientific knowledge that they would like to share in an educational setting.
Project Plymouth Schools Oceanographic Studies facilitator Carol 'Krill' Carson and participating researcher Kelly Rakow have developed a guide for making plankton sieves, a very handy tool for studying plankton in the classroom!
Download a poster on the Waves and Tsunamis Project, a collaboration between a marine seismologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and middle school teachers in Plymouth Massachusetts.
Plymouth Public Schools and WHOI researcher Dr. Ralph Stephen developed curriculum on wave action for middle school students. The team designed five hands-on investigation stations for students to rotate through that dealt with wavelength, amplitude, and frequency. One of the investigations included this interactive website for both teachers and students, designed by Dr. Stephen to explain ocean wave properties.
In Fairhaven public schools, the Ocean Sciences Education Institute (OSEI) team developed curriculum to introduce the carbon cycle to the 6th, 7th and 8th grades. By bringing cutting edge research into the middle school classroom, OSEI introduced students to the carbon cycle, its relationship to human activities, and its importance globally. Download the carbon cycle diagram here.
During this lesson, students will think about how the features of a scallop shell that are easily measured can be used to determine things about the live scallop that are difficult to measure. During the lab, students will collect data about each shell, including height, width, number of rings and any physical abnormalities. This information will allow the students to predict the area and age of the scallop. The area measurement will then be used to predict the weight of the meat (what we eat) of the scallop.
As part of her involvement in COSEE New England’s Ocean Sciences Education Institute II project, Dr. Juanita Urban-Rich researched and produced a hand-drawn poster identifying common species of marine plankton.
The Marine Fisheries Series project on PBS is an excellent tool for formal and informal educators. Included with the two documentaries, Empty Oceans and Empty Nets and Farming the Seas is a comprehensive activity guide. The activity guide for students encompasses six different well-reviewed activities covering material in the documentaries.
Fisheries Learning on the Web is a comprehensive curriculum about the Great Lakes ecosystem with three core units: Food Web, Water and Fish. Geared toward upper elementary and middle school educators, this standards-based lesson features hands-on activities.
The Zebra Mussel Mania Traveling Trunk is an educational kit and curriculum that allows elementary and middle school students to explore the effects of invasive species, particularly the zebra mussel, on ecosystems and local economies.
