Exemplary Teaching Activities
Beginning in 2011, On the Cutting Edge began a process to review the extensive collection of activities submitted by workshop participants and members of the geoscience community. With the transition of the On the Cutting Edge program into NAGT the review process is now being used to broadly review online teaching activities relevant to NAGT's community of Earth educators. Through this review processes activities are scored on 5 elements: scientific veracity; alignment of goals, activity, and assessment; pedagogical effectiveness; robustness; and completeness of the description. The activities that score very highly in these areas become part of the Cutting Edge Exemplary Collection and are featured below.
You may also be interested in the full collection of teaching activities.
Subject: Geoscience
Theme: Teach the Earth Show all
Teach the Earth > Teaching Topics > Water
18 matchesGrade Level
Online Readiness Show all
Online Ready
18 matchesResults 1 - 10 of 18 matches
Lesson 1: Water Resources and Water Footprints (Middle School) part of Teaching Activities
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
This lesson helps students understand why Earth is considered the "water planet." Students analyze how much of Earth's water is available for humans to use for life-sustaining purposes, and they ...
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Lesson 3: The Value of a Water Footprint (Middle School) part of Teaching Activities
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
Session 1 of this lesson begins with a quick activity to get students thinking about their direct and virtual water use. It introduces a few new ideas for virtual water use that may surprise students, including the ...
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Lesson 3: The Value of a Water Footprint (High School) part of Teaching Activities
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
Session 1 of this lesson begins with a quick activity to get students thinking about their direct and virtual water use. It introduces a few new ideas for virtual water use that may surprise students, including the ...
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Lesson 2: My Water Footprint (Middle School) part of Teaching Activities
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
This lesson centers on a deeper exploration of the water footprint associated with food. Students learned in Lesson 1 that virtual water, especially as it relates to food, typically makes up the majority of their ...
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Unit 2: Water Footprints part of Water, Agriculture, Sustainability
Robert Turner, University of Washington-Bothell Campus
Unit 2 opens a window into water accounting and reveals intensive water use that few people think about. How much water goes into common commodities? Have you considered how much water it takes to support our ...
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Unit 2.1: Hydrologic Impact of Land-Use Change part of An Ecosystem Services Approach to Water Resources
John Ritter, Wittenberg University; Meghann Jarchow, University of South Dakota; Ed Barbanell, University of Utah
In this activity, students model the impact of land-cover changes on stormwater runoff using the EPA's National Stormwater Calculator (Calculator). The students are introduced to the Calculator through a ...
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Isotope Hydrograph Separation part of Data and Model Driven Hydrology Education:Units
Anne Jefferson, Kent State University-Main Campus
Separation of hydrographs into event and pre-event fractions based on measurements and data, rather than arbitrary formulae, was a revolutionary technique in watershed hydrology in the 1970s and has continued to be ...
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How Many People Can the Aquifer Support? part of NAGT:Our Resources:Teaching Resources:Teaching Materials Collection
Samantha Lindgren, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This aquifer simulation allows students to investigate the effects of adding a city and a farm, and adding wells with different pumping rates to meet human consumption needs. Students can observe the changes in the water table, wetlands, and river outflow through generated graphs and use the simulation to analyze the effects of human activity, drought, and climate change on the availability of fresh water.
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Watershed area and discharge relationships part of Hydrogeology:Hydrogeology, Soils, Geochemistry 2013:Activities
Steven Petsch, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Students use USGS WaterData website to find data on area, average annual discharge and response to high-precip events in small watersheds in southern New England. Data for the class are compiled to generate graphs ...
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River of the Dammed part of Hydrogeology:Hydrogeology, Soils, Geochemistry 2013:Activities
Kallina Dunkle, Austin Peay State University
This activity is designed to engage students in an active debate about land use and planning, human populations, ecosystems, and sustainability by assigning every student to a "community" along a ...
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