What You'll Do
As Stephanie Keep showed you in the opening video, digital media can help you and your students explore content around ecosystems in an engaging and dynamic way. Students can build a food web or hitch a ride on a whale meeting its energy needs with krill. They can also learn how we know what we know by observing scientists in the field or lab, actually doing their work.
In this STEM Professional Development module, you’ll be introduced to media from PBS LearningMedia and consider how these videos and interactives can enhance teaching and learning of the flow of energy and cycling of matter in an ecosystem. Along the way, you’ll take notes and engage with other short assessment activities. At the end of the module, you’ll complete a final assignment that reflects your developing perspective on the value and affordances of media in science instruction.
Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. Decomposers recycle nutrients from dead plant or animal matter back to the soil in terrestrial environments or to the water in aquatic environments. The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem. (MS-LS2.B)
