Finding Earth Education Resources at SERC
SERC hosts over 100 Earth education project websites. This brief guide outlines a set of strategies Earth educators can use to effectively discover resources (activities, pedagogic guidance, events....) across this diverse collection. The central theme is that the resources specific to your needs may be sprinkled across several different project websites. So you need embrace a foraging mindset: use the tools below to identify and jump between the multiple locations that may be rich in the type of resources you're interested in.
The Teach the Earth Theme Areas Provide a Spectrum of Different Starting Points
Teach the Earth is a portal to all the Earth Education materials SERC hosts. Clicking on any of the Themes identified on the front page will give you a short list of starting points for exploration on that particular theme. So if one of the pre-existing themes aligns with your interests these can be a good place to start your exploration.
Looking for Teaching Activities? Use the Teach the Earth Activity Search
The Teach the Earth portal includes a search interface specifically designed to support searching across all of the over 5000 Earth-related teaching activity housed within SERC-hosted sites. We recommend you start with the facets on the right to narrow down the set of resources by grade level or topic. Keep in mind that the activity you need may not show up if your search terms don't happen to exactly match those in the activity. But you can always use this interface to find some activities that are close to what you want. Then forage outward from those activities, exploring the projects they live in or using the recommender.
![[creative commons]](/images/creativecommons_16.png)
Jumped to a Resource? Take a Minute to Explore the Project
SERC-hosted resources were generally created for and sit within a project website. If you've just landed on a page, take a minute to figure out what the project is about. If the project is well-aligned with your interests then it can be much more efficient to explore within the specific project site rather than wade through everything SERC has to offer. Start with the navigation menu on the left side of the page. In most cases you can use this to jump immediately to the top of the project website or to an 'About this project' page where you get the lay of the land. Also, check that menu for links to collections within the project (e.g. Teaching Activities). These will be smaller curated collections specific to the project. And if the project isn't really relevant to you today beyond the page you initially landed on? Then you might want to use the recommender to make a horizontal jump to another project.
Found a Promising Resources That is Close To What You Want? Follow the Recommender
At the bottom of many pages you'll find a Pages You Might Like section. This set of recommendations points to other pages, from across all of SERC's collections, that are related to the page you're on right now. Following these links is a great way to leap from project to project following a specific theme or engaging in serendipitous discovery.
Use the Where I've Been bar to Stay Oriented and Find Your Way Back
The Where I've Been bar at the bottom of every page keeps track of all the pages you've visited recently. As you forage across multiple projects you can use it to immediately jump back to the page you saw several minutes ago that now seems like the one you might really want. No need to open a thousand tabs. Your visit history is shown chronologically and grouped by project website.
Found Something Useful? Save it to your Favorites
The Favorites feature is available in the upper right hand corner of every SERC page when you're logged in. You can save pages, group them into collections and share them with your friends. You can even sign up to get email notifications when your favorite pages get updates.
This guide covers the highlights from a longer webinar on strategies for finding resource at SERC. Watch the full webinar recording for even more insights into how to make the most of the free resources your fellow Earth educators have shared.