This blog submission comes from Mary Ford, Ocean Education Manager at National Geographic. To see more of Mary and the Ocean Team’s work, check out the National Geographic Ocean Education materials on our website by following this link.

I’m the Ocean Education Manager at National Geographic and really interested in what people are teaching and learning about the ocean throughout the world.  So I decided to make a word cloud by Googling the term “ocean education” and then copied all the text from the homepages of the first 10 websites that showed up. (Natgeoed.org/ocean was on there!)  It’s interesting to see what popped up.

Science is clearly a common focus of ocean education, and so is exploration. This gives me a lot to think about. Why is it that the ocean inspires such an interest in exploration, and how can we capitalize on this interest to help people learn and care more about the ocean? Also, should ocean education feature subject areas other than science? Can we add resources that highlight connections to social studies, English, math, P.E.? What do others think? Have YOU had great opportunities to learn about the ocean?

Mary Ford, National Geographic Society