Planet Earth: Understanding and Protecting our Environment
You can use the resources below to support you, whether you are using the course in your classroom teaching, or remotely.
Using the course in your classroom teaching
You can choose whether to use the individual lesson plan for a stand-alone lesson, or the three-lesson scheme of work.
The information you need can be found in the Planet Earth: Understanding and Protecting our Environment Individual Lesson Plan or Planet Earth: Understanding and Protecting our Environment Lesson Scheme.
Using the course when teaching remotely and for individual students
You may be teaching a full class remotely, or you may need work for individual students. The students can work through the course, and then complete an activity or join a discussion.
When setting this course for your students, you can choose what work they must send you to show their progress. You may wish to set your own assignments, but to make it easier, you can use one or more of the options described here.
All the text you need to set the work is included in the Planet Earth: Understanding and Protecting our Environment Teacher Pack.
Students work on the course individually and send back individual work
The simplest approach is for the students to each complete the course and then submit a piece (or pieces) of work to you based on their learning, using their school email or other agreed communication method. Here are some options for work you can set (all described in detail in the Teacher Pack):
Option 1: Reflection
They write a short reflection discussing what they have learned in the course.
Option 2: Test questions
Once they finish the course, they complete a short, written assessment with open questions.
Option 3: Activities
Students complete a single activity or research task based on some of the content from the course.
Option 4: Project
Based on their learning in the course, they work on a project to find out about an invasive species in their area, or a place that interests them and write a short report about it.
Students work on the course individually and then participate in a group online discussion
If you have regular online sessions with your students, you could use these to discuss the content from the course (discussions could be video or text-based). This could be a general discussion, feature presentation and/or discussion of group work.
Group discussion:
The discussion covers the general theme of soil and why it is important.
Group work:
In small groups, they develop a group presentation (including additional research) that they work on before the session and then present. The task is to find data online on different indicators of climate change:
- Marine sediments
- temperature levels
- CO2 levels
- species numbers/extinction rates.
They then highlight and explain any patterns or links they see.
Additional support
You can use the 'How to use FutureLearn' guide with your students to get them started.