Good morning everyone! I teach Biology, Earth & Space Science, Astronomy, and Oceanography in Remus, Michigan. I will be having my Oceanography students - 11th and 12th graders - participate in this ISCFC project. I learned about it at the NSTA National Conference on Science Education in San Antonio, TX, earlier this month. I am also a NOAA Climate Steward and have done some work with carbon footprint studies with my Biology students previously. I am looking forward to getting my students involved here.

Hi there! My name is Patricia Mateo, I teach English at a high school in Barcelona (Spain) called Institut Joan Brossa and I’m taking part in the ISCFC project with a large group of 15 y.o. students in their last year of compulsory secondary education, the equivalent to 10th grade, I think. Since English is not their native language I hope they won’t have problems to participate in the project, they are highly motivated and this is maybe what accounts the most.
Looking forward to take part in all the activities.

Hello everyone! My name is Chrissy Johnson and I am a middle school science teacher in a school right outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My 8th grade students have been studying energy and doing research about our energy sources and all the energy consuming elements within our buildings in preparation for an energy audit we will be doing of our school. Finding out about ISCFC from a colleague who passed on this information, was not only perfect timing, but a very exciting conversation to become involved in. We are working on preparing for calculating our carbon footprints and are very excited to join in the discussions with everyone! I am looking forward to the experience that this will provide to my students and each of us within this endeavor.

Hello,

My name is Annika Ruohonen and I am a teacher from Porvoo, Finland. My pupils and I have now participated in ISCFC, a bit ahead of the schedule due to the May 1st national holiday next week here in Finland. We will be posting a couple of comments in the groups today, and we’re hoping to participate in some discussions May 8th when we return.

Here is a link to our blog http://9englishclub.wordpress.com where we have written about earth and water (among other things) earlier this term. We will be posting about our ISCFC experience later as well.

We are thankful for Geraldine for contacting us and introducing this project to us. We will most definitely participate in the upcoming years as well.

Looking forward to connecting with other students and teachers!

Annika

Happy Earth Day!
48 schools are already enrolled for the ISCFC beginning on April 29th. Participating will be schools from Bangladesh, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, and the United States.

Hello Feb 2013 teachers!! We now have pins on the map from our first Feb 2013 classes.

http://footprint.stanford.edu/compare.html

First, we warmly welcome our first classes from Guatemala (Claudia María Lezama Santana’s AP Environmental Science class from the American School of Guatemala City) and Bangladesh (Animesh Kumar Saha and his Biology students from St. Joseph Higher Secondary School in Dhaka)! We’re also quite pleased to have returning ISCFC teacher Jen Mortensen and her Science/Technology students from Waterloo Intermediate School in Wisconsin, USA. We also have three new US participants: Bhavna Rawal and her Science Club & Science class students from Quest Early College High School (Houston, Texas, USA), Lorraine Perez and her Zoology students from Russellville High School (Alabama, USA) and Jared Lewis and his Environmental Science students from Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy (Connecticut, USA).

Fantastic! Whose classes will be next?

I’d like to see a discussion started around the limits of consumer activism. Yes, it’s important to normalize conservation behaviors, but it’s also critical to consider the power of collective action, especially when dealing with problems of the commons. To prompt this point, I’ve asked my students to calculate their carbon footprint twice as described below.

“After you’ve calculated your carbon footprint, it might be instructive to imagine a low-carbon life and see what’s possible based on your personal choices as a consumer. Imagine everything you could reasonably do to lower your carbon footprint and enter that low-carbon lifestyle into the carbon footprint calculator. How close does that get you to the 1000 kg annual output that would be the global average emission required to stabilize atmospheric CO2 concentrations at about 450ppm? (Note that the 2007 IPCC report Table SPM 6 suggests that stabilizing at 450 ppm would lead to an equilibrium temperature increase of about 3 C, still a major and very dangerous degree of warming).

If personal choices as consumers (even if everyone were to make these same choices to conserve) aren’t enough to lower CO2 emissions to a still-disastrous-but-not-catastrophic level, what other options are there?

What do you predict for the future?”

I’d love to see this discussion engaged by students around the world, but couldn’t figure out how to start a new discussion in the ISCFC page myself.

Dear ISCFC teachers,
Wow! Your students are making phenomenal contributions to the discussions! There is such strong participation that we would like to extend the discussions through next week for those who would like to continue.

Dear ISCFC teachers, I wanted to let you know that I found a small mis-calculation in our footprint calculator last night. The math behind the light bulb question (question #15 in the survey) did not match the wording of the question. The result is that some students will have overestimations of their home footprints, if they have a lot of light bulbs or put a large number of total hours used.

I have reworded the question asking for an approximate average number of hours used per bulb. I also include a note on that page for how to correctly enter the data if they want to be more accurate than that. In any case, if your student saved their data by registering with the calculator, they could go back and recalculate their home footprints by adjusting qustion 15.

Sorry about the error!

This November, climate change scientist Bill McKibben and 350.org are hitting the road to build the movement that will change the math of the climate crisis. Check the schedule to see if you can go to learn about the program.