Contribute an Activity to Teach the Earth

Have you developed an Earth-related teaching activity that has worked well in your own classroom or in the field? You can share it here. The information you provide will be used to create a public web page describing your activity. Activities go through peer review (opens in a new window) with activities recognized for passing the review or even highlighted as exemplary.

Before you start, explore the collection. The exemplary collection (opens in a new window) has examples of strong activities. Search the entire collection (opens in a new window) to see if an activity like yours already exists in our collections. This is especially important if you are contributing an activity that is based on another person's work. If your activity is very similar to one that is already in our collections, please use the button on the original activity web page to submit your modifications via the the Community Contribution Tool instead.

Copyright: You retain all rights to your contributed work and are responsible for referencing other people's work and for obtaining permission to use any copyrighted material within your contribution. By contributing your work to this web site, you give everyone a license for non-commercial distribution of the material, provided that they attribute the material to you. View our terms of use (opens in new window) for more details about this kind of Creative Commons license (opens in new window/tab).

Accessibility: Activities are most impactful if they are accessible to all learners. We encourage you to submit materials that follow current best practices around accessibility. While our system will attempt to present your activity as an accessible web page, only you can ensure the accessibility of any files you've uploaded. Our accessibility guidelines (opens in new window/tab) are a good place to learn more about making the content you create accessible.

There are two ways to use this form:

  1. Fill out the form and edit the resulting web page directly. After you submit this form you will immediately be able to view a web page containing your materials and make changes and additions to that page.
  2. Fill out the entire form and wait for us to make it into a web page. You can just submit this form and SERC staff will take care of processing it. This process usually takes a few days, although just before a workshop it may take longer.

Please read through the form and make sure that you have all of the information you will need before you begin. Also, please pay careful attention to spelling and grammar; we will not proofread your submission before we make it public.

We encourage you to create an account and log in before you fill out this form. You'll be able to save incomplete drafts and return to this page to complete and submit them later.
Thank you in advance for sharing your activity!








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Have multiple authors? Once you submit your activity you can edit the resulting web page and add in information about the other authors.


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Type of Activity






Appropriate Grade Level(s)










Activity Duration





Readiness for use in Online Learning






Please provide a short description of your activity or assignment and its outcomes. Be sure to include essential key words or index terms to help users find resources using our search/browse functions.


To help your colleagues understand when or how they might successfully use your activity with their own students, please provide the following information on context.







To help your colleagues understand the role of this activity or assignment in your course, please provide a statement of the goals that you have for students in the following three areas:







This section should include a narrative describing the mechanics of the activity and all the materials needed to implement the activity (or links and references to those materials).
  • If the material is available on another site please provide the full url.
  • If you have the materials in hand they can be uploaded using the fields below and they will be embedded in the final page so that they can be downloaded.
  • If they are published print materials please provide a complete bibliographic reference.
  • If the activity is fully documented at another site please provide the url along with a brief (one or two sentence) description of the other site.
For all materials include, in the box below, a brief description of each item covering what it is and what its role is in the activity.

If you upload files as part of your activity remember to consider their final use in deciding on appropriate formats. Materials that other faculty are likely to modify should be provided in easily editable formats (plain text, Word files), whereas materials that will be likely only used verbatim are most convenient in formats that are universally readable (PDF format is often a good choice).

Once this form has been submitted we can work with you to integrate the downloadable files into the text of this section.

Please be sure all materials you upload can be freely redistributed. For more information about copyright as it applies to materials you are sharing through this site please check our more detailed discussion (opens in new window) of this issue.


Supporting Materials

You may upload up to five additional files to accompany your submission. If you have more than five additional files, we recommend that you upload the first 5 using this form and then attach the rest by editing your activity page after you hit the submit button.

Include editable versions: If you are including information in formats that aren't easily editable/re-purposable (e.g. pdf documents, data presented in graphs, equations presented as images) consider including versions that other instructors can modify (Word or text documents, raw data from graphs, LaTeX markup for equations). This will make your activity easier to adapt for different learners and contexts.

Including files with information for instructors only? If any of these files should be kept out of the hands of students (e.g. answer keys) make a note of which ones these are in the "Notes about your Submission" section below. We'll set those specific files up so they are only accessible by verified educators.

Teaching Notes

This section should include notes and tips for instructors who might use the activity. Information such as common areas of confusion, things that need reinforcement, safety guidelines and other practical tips, and pointers for making the best use of the activity are appropriate.


Assessment

Describe briefly how you determine whether students have met the goals of this assignment or activity.


Resources

This section should include references and links to online resources that discuss the specific activity or will support faculty and/or students using the activity. References related to the general teaching technique should not be included here, but should be recommended for inclusion in the associated module.

Web resources should include both the url and a brief description of the site (and why it is relevant). Print resource should include basic citation information as well as a brief description of the resource.