"We give students skills to create meaning where many would find nothing but fog."

Jamie McKenzie, FNO Vol 9|No 2|October|1999

This page is about helping you find topics of local interest for your learners. They will learn more from research and problem-solving exercises if they can relate these to their own lives. Brain theory has proven that learners will learn more if they can relate what they are learning to a real-life situation in their experience or in their community.

Now that you and your learners have access to the Internet, it is going to be much easier for you to find information. You may have been limited in the past by not having an adequately stocked library - or not had a library at all.  Now you are going to be able to give learners tasks that involve information gathering on just about any topic or learning area you wish to name. This could be a mistake. More information is not necessarily better information. Rather try to use the Internet to find information that helps your learners understand local issues.

Sometimes you may not be able to allow your learners access to the Internet or the computers.  In these cases you can find the information and print it out on paper to use in class. 

Often, the most successful lessons are the ones where the teacher prepares for the lesson by finding the necessary   information first and saving it so that the learners do not have to waste too much time searching.  Make yourself familiar with methods of doing this by referring to the tips on saving web pages to your local network.

Environmental awareness is an educational goal that cuts across learning and subject areas. The environment is integral to all learning areas and invites us to use resources that are available to us. You can combine all the natural resources you have always had with your new technological resource, the Internet. Here are some ideas for topics that relate to the environment, which you could use for your classes:

• Have your learners perhaps been involved in environmental projects such as recycling or tree planting? 
• Perhaps you have wanted to do a project on your local area.  
• Maybe it is an historical area, where events of national importance have taken place. 
• Maybe all you have to do is use the resource of interviewing local people in order to collect the relevant information, if the event did not happen too long ago.  
• Maybe you would just like to find about the history of the school itself.
•  Perhaps you would like to improve the school grounds or investigate pollution in the area.  You may have to analyse the local waste materials. 
• You may want to discuss the importance of water in your community. Can you think of ways you can use local resources for this?
• Maybe your learners live fairly close to the school - you could construct a map of the whole area with all the houses on it on the ceiling of your classroom. Learners are going to have to ask a lot of questions before getting that one right.
• Maybe you could start off by just drawing a map of the school or even just the play ground. Drawing maps can be difficult for younger learners.  
• Any topic that involves a trip to a river, park or the beach will instantly motivate your learners. Collecting all the different species of plants or insects in an area would be an interesting activity and then trying to identify them using the resources on the WWW?

Remember, if the topics that you and your learners choose, are going to make an impact on their everyday lives, then you are going to have your learners interested and motivated.  They are more likely to be interested in issues that affect their daily lives.

Here are some environmental education resources on the web: 

UN Foundation Global Issues

World Wildlife Fund

Kids for Saving Earth

As you research other areas of local interest and come across good local websites with information, complete the Web site evaluation form and share it with other members of your group.