With the 40th anniversary of Earth Day coming up next week, I was happy to hear that Discovery Education would be hosting a webinar where Philippe would speak directly to our students. I’ve heard Philippe speak (I’ve met him twice before) and I know he is very engaging, so I was really excited to make this an interesting experience for my 4th graders.

I prepared my students for this by downloading Ocean’s Deadliest from Discovery Streaming (if you are a subscriber, just click the Discovery Streaming link, log in and you will be brought to the video). As we watched Philippe on this exciting documentary, we got a good sense of Philippe’s mission. It was good for the students to have a sense of connection with Philippe prior to the webinar.

While Philippe spoke about the oceans, overfishing, pollution and simple changes we can all make to create a positive change, he shared some photos and videos. My students recognized much of what he shared from the documentary. It was familiar and made sense to them. There was also the backchannel scrolling up on the sidebar. (It was fascinating to watch how well the students attended to the chat as well as to what Philippe was sharing.)

Later that evening, I noticed that one of my students, Julia, blogged about the webinar. Reading her post was such a heart-warming, proud moment for me because it was unprompted. Julia is one of my best writers and brilliant thinkers. If you read her post and see what she came up with, you will see why.

Thanks to Philippe for sharing his message in such a friendly, down-to-earth manner. Thanks also to Discovery for hosting the webinar. Special thanks to Julia for an awesome blogpost!

The longer version shows more of my students, has a few more quotes and gives a clearer picture of how the day went.

Enjoy!

:30 version:

1:30 version:

I had an opportunity to meet Philippe Cousteau last week as part of a series of events recognizing our district’s outstanding achievement in being on the forefront of using technology for instructional integration and for reaching the milestone of one million digital educational videos on Discovery Streaming. The School District of Palm Beach County is one of only a handful of school systems in the nation, and the first school system in Florida, to reach this milestone. Listening to Mr. Cousteau speak is truly a pleasure as he is engaging and his message of environmental defense is inspiring.

Mr. Cousteau is the 29 year old grandson of Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He continues his grandfather’s legacy by openly speaking and acting on behalf of the environment.

He was kind enough to pose for pictures and sign an autograph for the boys and girls in my 4th grade classes. I was excited to see that wrote “Mrs. Kolbert’s Class, You are the hope of the future. Philippe Cousteau” because we’ve recently learned about ecosystems and the food web, with particular focus on how humans often negatively impact the environment, disrupting the ecosystem and the food web.

Can you explain what he means by “You are the hope of the future?”