You have to register to get to the good stuff in
Teacher’s Domain,
, the NSDL Pathway sponsored by WGBH-Boston that trains teachers and repackages popular public television programs for classroom use. But now you can keep a lot of it. Teacher’s Domain has opened a special collection of images, videos, and animations called Open Educational Resources that users can download, share, and remix free of charge.
The image above was provided to Teacher’s Domain by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. It is copyrighted by the WGBH Educational Foundation but can be used for any noncommercial educational purpose with no expiration date. It shows the Aral Sea, a freshwater lake on the southern border of Kazakhstan, as it was in 1973. The Aral was the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world back then, but in the last three decades the rivers that fed the sea were diverted for irrigation. Here’s what the sea looked like in 2000:
The shrinking of the Aral Sea has created a new desert with huge dust storms, lower humidity, and decreased crop yields over a large region. Teacher’s Domain has several other open resources that illustrate the unintended environmental consequences of human activity and hundreds more you can use to enliven science, math, and social studies classes any way you choose. Funding for this collection comes from the National Science Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Teachers’ Domain has an extremely broad range of resources. Here are the keywords used to describe the site, taken from its catalog listing on NDSL: Science–Study and teaching (Primary), Astronomy , Biology , Physics , Digital Libraries — Media Centers/School Libraries, Educational Technology — Educational media, Middle School, Earth science, Education (General), Meteorology, Physical sciences , Space sciences, Atmospheric science, Climatology, Early Elementary, Environmental science, GMO, High School, Hydrology, Kindergarten,
Later Elementary, Science - Animals, Science - Biology General, Science - Botany and Agriculture, Science - Cell Biology, Science - Environment and Ecology, Science - Evolution, Science - Genetics, Science - Human Biology, Space science, biological sciences, genetic engineering, genetically modified foods, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and transgenic.











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