School Librarian Creates Web Lesson on Oil Spill

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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 05/24/2010

Melissa Corey helped turn a catastrophe into a teachable moment. After the explosion of Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig leased by BP PLC on April 20 off the coast of Louisiana, Corey, a library media specialist at Benton High School in St. Joseph, MO, had a teacher ask her to conduct a mini-unit with his students, incorporating the oil spill into lessons on environmental disasters.

Corey logged online and developed a LibGuide on the oil spill combining news links, a Delicious linkroll, an RSS feed, and a Google Map that compares the relative size of the spill to Manhattan, Paris, and other global cities.

“Needless to say this all piqued the student’s curiosity, increased interest in the assignment, and improved their assignments,” says Corey, by email. “In many classes, we ended up having very open discussions about the disaster in addition to completing the assignment.”

While not every teacher and school librarian may be as technologically nimble as Corey, many existing websites offer resources on how to best explain the ramifications of the ongoing oil spill to K–12 students.

Take The New York Times spill tracker, which illustrates the expansion of the seepage starting from the day the rig sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 22. Or PBS’s extensive site offering activities, talking points for students and teachers, lessons on wetlands, and ways children, parents and educators can help nature when an environmental disaster occurs.

For Corey, turning to online resources didn’t just prove effective, she felt it was critical to help meet the state’s adoption of its new Information and Communication Technology Literacy grade and course-level expectations for students.

Teachers clearly agreed.

“This is an opportunity to take science to the field and out of the textbook,” says Alex Paolillo, Benton’s biology teacher by email. “I wish I had these resources available to me in college!”

Photograph by IBRRC/International Bird Rescue Research Center