Building on last year’s Exploring Environments units (G10 Environmental Science), in which students formed groups and designed their own units of inquiry, we have once again taken on the science-writing challenge.

Brief: write a 1,200-1,500 word article for an online audience highlighting a case study connected to your unit’s central ideas. The articles should be aimed at peers and smarter, and should include properly-used media and video where appropriate.

Assessment: One World and Communication in Science

Process: Topics proposed and drafted through GoogleDocs, with students seeking feedback on writing through highlighting and comments in the GoogleDocs. In the final sessions they put the articles together in WordPress and gave peer-feedback for quality of presentation, flow and message. We aimed to use images found through CreativeCommons Search and through Getty’s free Images (though the embed widget went squiffy on some of their wordpress editors).

Teacher note: this kind of task is a great way to realise that we are all language teachers. Managing workflow through GoogleDocs/Hapara makes commenting on drafts easier, though students need to keep their work there in order to show progression.

……….o0O0o……….

Some highlights (with a range of scores) are posted below. Please click-through, read them and leave some encouraging comments!

• Bottom-trawling: destroying centuries of growth, by Polina
• Nozomi asks “Should we eat bugs?“
• “The ocean is turning to blue vinegar,” according to Jay
• Saumil explores George Monbiot’s articles on “how wolves change rivers” and how rewilding might help us return nature to some semblance of its former glory.
• Nyeong-Min asks us to “protect our UV protector“
• Seung-Cheol tells a bee story, exploring colony collapse disorder
• Luke coughs his way through the Beijing air pollution and places our demand for cheap goods at the root
• Lucas gives an explainer of PM2.5 pollution and thinks about what we can do about it.
• Andy gets concerned about the effect of CO2 on our beach time
• Koh asks if fish farming is a viable alternative to overfishing