Earlier this month, I quietly added a new page called Teaching Resources to the blog.  At the time it was just a placeholder, but now it represents my attempt to use this space for things other than recaps of papers, field work and conferences.  As part of the Scientific Research and Education Network (SciREN), I developed a lesson plan for high school classes that uses data from sharks tagged as part of ECU’s acoustic telemetry research to teach students about life histories, habitat importance, and human impacts in the marine environment.  I even managed to fit a little fisheries management and shark biology in there.  Head over to the new page and check it out, and if you use the lesson plan definitely let me know how it went over in the classroom.

SciREN is a great initiative headed up by grad students at the UNC and Duke marine labs that connects local teachers with marine scientists to bring brand new, cutting edge marine science into the classroom.  Tomorrow night I’ll be heading down to the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores to meet and talk sharks with area school teachers.  This is shaping up to be a really cool event, with a huge variety of marine science topics for all grade levels coming from researchers at just about every North Carolina school involved in coastal research.  To give you an idea of the range of marine and coastal topics that teachers could bring to their classrooms, check out the SciREN Facebook page, which the team has been updating with info on the scientists attending the workshop.  If you’re a teacher and are interested in checking this out, there is still time to register.