Kathy Gorski's List: Older sites, still useful

This is an older site that is still very useful. Not exclusively a polar science site, there are some great resources and activities for their expeditions to the poles. (Woods Hole can usually be relied on for high quality materials.)

This is the archive for the lesson plans and related materials for the TEA project (there are some excellent resources here) It is no longer active, although the parent ARMADA project is still underway. It is easier to link to it from this archive than it is to get to the TEA resources from ARMADA!.

This site is no longer active, and unfortunately some sections were never completed. However, it has some good graphics and language that are especially usable with upper elementary students. There are some data sets that could be the basis for classroom analysis.

This commercial site has some great free resources, too. Good FAQs and downloadable lessons make it worth a look. Students are intrigued by the aurora and this provides a good slide from cosmology to other polar studies.

An Antarctica expedition by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The blogs are informative and the photos are great. The captions make them fun and very usable in the classroom

This is an older, commercial advocacy site from Australia that has some merit in the links and the videos. Unfortunately, the videos sometimes load, and sometimes don’t ; too bad, because they are very good (Recent trials have been more successful on a Mac than a PC). The target for this might be a stewardship or ethics discussion with upper middle or high school students. It’s worth a look, even though it is an older site. If you can get your hands on "Sleeping Giants", it is a great basis for a deep discussion with high school and older groups.

This site, no longer active, documents polar expeditions via two specific projects. ‘The Case of the Elusive Element’ studies phytoplankton populations. ‘POP Goes Antarctica’ studies pollutants in the food chain. Both would be good to use with middle school students. ‘What is Polar Science?’ is an excellent primer for all, and there are many good links to activities and other sites (that still appear to be active). An oldie but goodie.

This is an older site by the same group that has Polar-Palooza. Although it’s no longer updated, it is a good starting point for learning about Antarctica. There are many still-active links that lead to more good things.

SnowSTAR 2007 was a Barrenlands Traverse project for IPY that has now ended and the site is no longer actively maintained. The website offers a great deal of good information that will let you incorporate history, math, social studies and more into your classroom, but there are a lot of incomplete pages as well. It seems to be most appropriate for 4 - 6 grades; but since it has some nice representations of things not seen elsewhere, it's worth a look for many levels.