Ocean Networks Canada’s Ocean Sense program offers educators and students an exciting opportunity to understand the importance of the global ocean. See the sidebar on the right for links to lessons and teaching resources to help you and your students gain insight into current oceanographic research and incorporate marine science into the classroom in an exciting and effective way.
Instrument Overviews are designed to provide the context, explaining why observatory instruments are used, how they work, how the data are used to explain ocean processes, and why the data may be globally relevant.
The lesson plans are designed with flexibility in mind and provide outlines for specific activities that are correlated to the curriculum while highlighting oceanographic concepts. The activities also provide some specific observatory data which help to illustrate the concepts. Lesson plans can be downloaded as PDFs or as Word docs that you can customize.
Using real-time data coming from the observatories and associated lesson plans, students can explore their local environments. Sharing information with students further afield is very much encouraged and will help students gain a global perspective on oceanic processes and ecosystems.
Site-specific data pages from community observatories in costal BC and the Arctic allow students to access, plot, save, and download observatory data. To create specific data plots based on instruments, students can choose a variable and a time range they want to explore.
Camera footage, hydrophone data, pre-generated plots, and links to extra resources are also available. For a quick snapshot of current conditions, the latest reading can be viewed. For a high level overview of seasonal and annual changes the “state of the ocean” graphs can be used.
Thoughts, opinions, graphs, cool data and student projects can be shared to the observatory community through Twitter using the hashtag #OceanSense; this feed appears on the Ocean Sense introduction page for the community to connect!
Contribute to program development
All materials in the Ocean Sense program are openly accessible and are developed in collaboration with program participants. You and your students are key to the continued growth and success of Ocean Sense.
At this stage of program development, we welcome your participation in:
- usability testing of the Ocean Sense webpages
- writing and/or reviewing new lesson plans and teaching resources for Ocean Sense
- helping connect other classes and schools to build the Ocean Sense community
If you are interested in contributing to the growth of the program, we'd love to hear from you!