How to use the Green Cool Schools website

The website includes teaching and learning materials for secondary school level 1 providing a knowledge base for school greening, which can be used by teachers for different teaching units.

The website is available in Austrian, Basque, English, German and Spanish. The language can be selected in the top menu as well as in the footer menu of each webpage.

The material consists of the following parts:

Background knowledge for each topic
Instructions for guided experiments on each topic to provide a hands-on learning experience. The experiments are doable in 1 to 3 teaching units and are intended for whole classes and/or smaller groups of learners of 6 people or more.

8 different TOPICS have been included in the pool for the material:

TOPICS: For each topic, background knowledge is provided under TOPICS.

EXPERIMENTS: : Each topic is supplemented by an EXPERIMENT related to the topic to provide hands-on learning experiences, deepen knowledge and connect the topic to the situation of the school itself.

REGIONAL INFORMATION includes specific regional information on each topic from Austria, Germany and Spain (country specific information).

How to use…

Under “Topics” teachers can select the topic they are interested in integrating into their teaching units. Background knowledge is provided for each topic, which can be used as content for teaching units, and includes:

“Benefits for green cool schools”, which means making a connection from each topic to the school itself: What can be done to become a Green Cool School?
Interesting facts are highlighted for each topic under “Did you know?”
“Tips” includes ideas on integrating the topic in school using different methods, for example: how best to approach the students etc.
“Opportunities to deepen the topic across disciplines”: ways on how to connect and deepen the topic with other disciplines are shown.

Each topic includes at least one topical “experiment”, which can be used for deepening knowledge. The experiments can be found at the end of each “topic” page or on the menu on the right-hand side under “Experiments / Regional”.

Each experiment stipulates the learning goals and gives detailed instructions and guidance on “preparation” work and the “tasks in class”. When relevant, “Tips” and “Did you know?” facts are included there as well.

Regional information includes “related matters in other countries” and “country specific information”. This section provides detailed country specific information on a specific matter regarding the respective overall topic. This can be used to connect the topic to the regional situation and to compare it to the situation in other countries. This information is available for all the countries of the project – Austria, Germany and Spain – and in all the languages. Further, a country specific list of links to further didactical material, videos, literature, good practice examples etc. is provided.