and Geology curriculum, although they are also used in Physics, Chemistry, Technology and Economy (economics). The structure of the units makes it possible for teachers to use entire stand-alone chapters, or to just extract the parts they consider most useful to their students. Each of these sections
was developed in two stages. First, the Climántica team published a secondary school teaching unit. Teachers played an active role in pro- ducing the unit’s content by participating in pilot experi- ences. The most successful and active teachers were then invited to work together with the Climántica team to design and implement educa- tional resources. This has led to the development of a body of material with potential for use by teachers in many different contexts, and since our website is available in Gali- cian, Castillian and English, its reach is much greater than the Galician region alone. In the second stage of project development, students
Up close and personal: students discuss what they just saw inside the base of a wind turbine.
chronicled in video lectures and seminars, interviews, docu- mentaries and courses, all found on Climántica TV1. It can also be seen in a short movie called “2101 Back To Climán- tica” which explains the project in English2.
and teachers play an active and ongoing role in growing the project. Through the Climántica website, students from 12-17 years old become climate change instructors, deliver- ing lessons to other students on topics such as the Arctic and Antarctic effect, the development of hurricanes, the absorp- tion of solar radiation, the greenhouse effect, the thermal regulation of the ocean, the evidence of carbon dioxide, ocean and atmosphere circulation, and so on. They also perform role play activities such as Climate Change Dynam- ics, How Much Does Our Energetic Dependence Cost?, The Hidden Element Game, and Imaginative Workshop on Peak Oil. At the same time, they produce papers for conferences, which may be published in the school journal and uploaded to the web. Finally, secondary students are organized into an obser-
vation network that provides environmental data to the Galician meteorological and water services agencies. This network currently includes more than 140 secondary schools (about 30% of all such schools in Galicia). While Galicia was not the first Spanish region to undertake
an extensive environmental education project, Climántica has become a model for the entire country by using “Web 2.0” technology to address climate change. (Websites which follow the Web 2.0 protocol provide means to generate active partici- pation and collaboration among users, such as blogs/forums, RSS feeds and social bookmarking.) As a result, Galicia has now joined Catalonia, the Basque region, Andalucia and Madrid as leaders in environmental education in Spain. The development of the Climántica project has been
Results
In its first two years of the Project, there have been more than one million hits on the website from 111 different countries. An online community of 8,000 teachers and students has developed a number of related blogs. Approximately 1,000 Galician teachers have attended Climántica training courses, and more than 3,000 students have attended Climántica workshops in their schools. Two annual student conferences have attracted almost 1,000 students, whose papers have subsequently been published online and in print. To date, we have distributed 12,000 copies of the inter-
disciplinary book Climaeucambio, which helps students develop basic skills to face the challenge of climate change. We also published 4,000 copies of our first teaching unit, which focuses on how our consumption and transportation habits have changed since our grandparents were young. We created and distributed 10,000 copies of a Climántica comic book for primary school children. Other entertaining and informative materials for primary schools such as 3D cartoon series, video games have been produced. For the general pub- lic, we have produced blogs, documentaries and magazines. Finally, we distributed 5,000 copies of a novel entitled La Tormenta de C (“The Storm of C”), which addresses vari- ous environmental issues related to climate change. Aimed at 10-15 year olds, some chapters are designed to be read in classroom and provoke discussion among students about how best to respond to the problems raised. Some of our
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