Following are some of the many online K–12 educational resources CIESIN offers for K–12 teachers and students, college classrooms, and graduate-level education and research.
CIESIN Fact Sheets
These PDF information sheets provide overviews and instruction for selected CIESIN online data resources, including instructions for use:
Earth2Class is a joint distance learning project of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia University Teachers College that provides online Earth science courses and content to K-12 teachers. Through these courses, teachers can improve their knowledge and understanding of issues in Earth and environmental science to help make sense of current issues in environmental policy and research. Through Earth2Class, teachers can find useful teaching resources on the CIESIN Web site, along with a list of questions that students can answer using CIESIN online tools and information.
Environmental Sustainability: Perspectives on the World
This multi-media teaching module was developed in collaboration with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning and Fathom.com. It includes talks, video clips of presentations by Columbia University scientists on the environmental systems and human responses that make up environmental sustainability, and an online mapping tool with data from the Environmental Sustainability Index. Issues covered include climate change and past civilizations, human impacts on the Arctic environment, sustainability in the Sahel, sustainable design, industrial ecology, and international environmental regimes.
This interactive mapping tool lets users visualize CO2 emissions data for the entire United States. Produced by CIESIN, the tool is part of NextGenerationEarth, a Web site of the Earth Institute at Columbia University that offers climate change information. The mapping tool flexibly interacts with the underlying data, from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Census Bureau, and U.S. Commerce Department.
This study of the Metropolitan East Coast (MEC) area is one of eighteen regional components of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, organized by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The MEC Educator's Pack is a package of GIS software, datasets and lesson plans designed for educators who are interested in using GIS technology to explore global climate change issues. The package includes a free GIS software program called ArcExplorer®, a registered trademark of Environmental Systems Resource Institute (ESRI), the world's leading GIS software developer. The datasets available include much of the data used in the MEC project such as the climate change models, GIS data from ESRI and the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER Files. Also provided are two lesson plans that use ArcExplorer to view the data and produce a series of maps to study climate change predictions in the MEC region.
Thematic Guides on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change
CIESIN's Thematic Guides offer overviews of some of the key topics and issues that pertain to the human dimensions of global environmental change. The guides are designed to complement data-access tools such as the CIESIN Gateway by providing context and background information.