Written by Liz Rauer & Amy Heemsoth

The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation is proud to launch our brand new Coral Reef Education Portal! This custom-built online platform contains a comprehensive coral reef curriculum complete with lesson plans, quizzes, educational videos, interactives, and games designed to educate people about life on coral reefs. This educational resource is free to anyone with an internet connection. Try it now to be one of the first people to get full access to all of our coral reef educational materials. You can even create an account to keep track of your progress, record your scores on quizzes, earn badges, and learn at your own pace.

We designed the Coral Reef Education Portal for students and teachers, but it is a useful teaching tool for anyone interested in learning about coral reefs. The Portal brings 21^st century coral reef education into the classroom and promises to be a great resource for high school science teachers. Teachers can download worksheets, get ideas for fun and instructive classroom activities, and track the progress of each of the students in their class.

All of the lesson plans and classroom exercises are aligned to the U.S. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as well as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Ocean Literacy Essential Principles and Fundamental Concepts (OL), and can be integrated into a variety of STEM courses including biology, chemistry, art, and math. The curriculum covers a wide variety of topics – most of the lesson plans in the curriculum use coral reefs as an example to teach broad themes relating to the natural world and our environment.

The digital coral reef curriculum currently contains 11 units on topics including coral anatomy, classification, ecology, growth, reproduction, and zonation, and we are already working on adding more. We are launching the Portal now, but we are still making updates and improvements, so please give it a try and let us know how it is working for you.

SIGN UP!
To learn more and sign up for a free user account, please visit the Coral Reef Education Portal.