https://rmpbs.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nvdtwm-sci-climatefuture/choosing-earths-climate-future/
PBS Learning Media
This learning activity takes one 50 minutes class period.
Learn more about Teaching Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness»Grade Level
Online Readiness
Topics
Climate Literacy
This Activity builds on the following concepts of Climate Literacy.
Click a topic below for supporting information, teaching ideas, and sample activities.
- Humans can take action
- Sun is primary energy
- Climate is complex
- Climate is variable
- Our understanding of climate
- Humans affect climate
Energy Literacy
This Activity builds on the following concepts of Energy Literacy.
Click a topic below for supporting information, teaching ideas, and sample activities.
Notes From Our Reviewers
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Teaching Tips | Science | Pedagogy |
Technical Details
Teaching Tips
- The resource has a link to transfer the material to the Google Classroom.
- There are 13 pages in this interactive lesson, each with a video or graphic, questions, and a place for students to take notes. For this to be effective, teachers should guide students through each page and decide how many pages to use. If all 13 pages are used with adequate time for students to discuss the questions and take notes, it may take time and teachers should plan for this.
- Teaching tips are listed on the lesson plan for each page.
About the Content
- This interactive lesson deals with three interconnected choices for society - suffer, adapt, mitigate - in response to climate change.
- There is an in-depth activity that can be expanded into a short essay or group project.
- Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
About the Pedagogy
- This lesson does a great job of giving leading questions to help take notes and understand topics as you work through the lesson, and then gives the opportunity to develop a class project or short essay to expand further. Prerequisites are listed in the teaching guide, as well as tips to engage and help run the program for diverse learners.
- This resource presents some negative results of the future with climate change if no action is taken now to prevent it. This can be stressful or emotional for students. In order to put this into context, it may be helpful to start this module by explaining that we can still take action to prevent some of these consequences to climate change and these scenarios are based on predictions.
- This resource engages students in using scientific data.
See other data-rich activities
Technical Details/Ease of Use
- Teacher Tips, Technical Notes and an introduction to using interactive lessons are provided to teachers, along with a transcript that can be shared with students. These resources are provided by links that generate a pop-up version which can be printed. If teachers are familiar with PBS Media lessons this is effective.
- As long as technological requirements are met, this is a straight-forward lesson that does a great job of scaffolding ideas. Website is user friendly with some difficulty connecting/bad gateways that came up for reviewers.