How I used these materials/High School Environmental Science

From OOGEEP

Submitted by E. Griffith, Dixie High School, New Lebanon, Ohio

Consider energy education and your curriculum. How can you incorporate what you have learned into your science curriculum?

Part of the life science, science as a way of knowing, technology, physical science, and inquiry standards for the 11th and 12th grade include examining renewable and nonrenewable resources and human effects on the environment. In my environmental science class I already address renewable resources, students build wind turbines and solar boats as projects to go along with these renewable resources. I feel that it is unfair to address these renewable resources and leave the fossil fuels and other non renewables in a negative light. Many texts, including the environmental science texts that I use, portray non renewables as “bad” resources. I plan on adding a section on oil and natural gas and give them an overview on drilling, refining, and the chemistry of fossil fuels. My goal is to make sure that the students have equal exposure to non renewable resources as renewable resources and they have a balanced view of all of them.

Considering the benchmarks/standards that you are required to teach what science concept or content will you plan to teach?

I plan to teach all of the required standards; however, I plan on incorporating the OOGEEP curriculum into my environmental science in order to cover the following standards…

• 05. Investigate that all fuels (e.g., fossil, solar and nuclear) have advantages and disadvantages; therefore society must consider the trade-offs among them (e.g., economic costs and environmental impact).
• 06. Research sources of energy beyond traditional fuels and the advantages, disadvantages and trade-offs society must consider when using alternative sources (e.g., biomass, solar, hybrid engines, wind and fuel cells).
• 02. Predict how decisions regarding the implementation of technologies involve the weighing of trade-offs between predicted positive and negative effects on the environment and/or humans.
• 03. Explore and explain any given technology that may have a different value for different groups of people and at different points in time
• 01. Explain how science often advances with the introduction of new technologies and how solving technological problems often results in new scientific knowledge.
• 01. Identify that science and technology are essential social enterprises but alone they can only indicate what can happen, not what should happen. Realize the latter involves human decisions about the use of knowledge.

Concepts include renewable and nonrenewable resources, advantages and disadvantages of each, advances in technology that affect each, and the environmental impact of each.

[edit] Ways to incorporate different teaching methods

• Lecture
  

I will give students an overview of natural gas and crude oil drilling and refining.

• Reading
  

Students will read and do research on the geology, drilling, refining, and products that come from crude oil. They will be responsible for knowing the vocabulary and having adequate background knowledge from their research to complete their major project for the oil/natural gas portion of their renewable/non renewable resource binder.

• Audio-visual
  

Students are given lecture (presentations) on the smartboard which allows me to incorporate video, audio, and still images into the lecture itself. These images, videos, and audio keep the students attention during the lecture portion of the unit. Furthermore, students will make presentations to the class giving them background on geology, drilling, refining..etc. The smartboard will allow them to incorporate video into their power point presentations and make their power points interactive.

• Demonstration
  

Students do many of the demonstrations for the class from the OOGEEP curriculum including the density columns that show the separation of oil, water, and rock. We can use this demonstration to show how oil moves out of spaces within rock and how natural gas and crude separate.

• Discussion Group
  

Students will be having many discussions regarding their pre conceived ideas about fossil fuels; they will be responsible for the research in order to back up their views on the use of fossil fuels verses the use of renewable resources.

• Practice by Doing
  

I am so excited to have my students do many of the experiments that were demonstrated at the workshop. The parts per million experiment, the density of plastics in order to separate them for recycling, and the experiments to see how much water different sizes of rocks can hold are just some of the experiments that the students will be doing. I want my environmental students to do them.

• Teach Others/Immediate Use of Learning
  

Teach a small lesson about each renewable and non renewable resource to elementary school students. My environmental science students will use these experiments that they performed to teach the elementary school students about each resource.

• Use of Technology
  

Students use the smartboard, computer, vernier lab quest in order to do experiments and presentations,

[edit] Ways to incorporate graphic organizers

As soon as I returned from class on that first day, I ordered Dinah Zike’s book. I plan on incorporating a number of graphic organizers into my curriculum this year for environmental science; including continuing flip charts that the students work on all year as they go through each renewable or non renewable resource. By the end of the year students should have 2 complete flip charts that detail many types of renewable and non renewable resources. Furthermore, students in my class will create models of oil wells or oil refineries. They can make posters, 3D models, digital model etc. of an oil well or refinery and they need to explain what is occurring within the well or refinery.

[edit] Ways to use field trips or make real-life industry connections

I would like to have a speaker come from an oil/natural gas refinery or oil/natural gas producer and speak to my students and speak to the cost, risks, technology improvements etc. in order to help address my students pre conceived ideas about oil/natural gas. Although our field trip budget has been slashed this year, I would like to essentially repeat the field trip we took during class; however, I would like to add a trip to a nuclear power plant and wind farm to give them a well rounded field trip that addresses energy production in general.