Organise your own ECOconference!

“The ECOconference is a platform for schools to raise awareness about environmental protection and sustainable development. It aims to inspire students and teachers to collaborate on environmental projects and spread knowledge that helps improve our surroundings.”

Objectives of the conference
Our civic association aims to change the mindset of the younger generation that can influence the behaviour of their community, including their parents. Through our activities, we will immerse students in the topic so that they themselves seek and disseminate information about sustainability. Based on data from the last 5 years, we know that hands-on experiences motivate students to be environmentally friendly. We bring in inspiring speakers, show them different examples of good practice, discuss and encourage them to take further action, including organising their own ECO-CONFERENCE at school. They have the opportunity to be helpful and make a real difference, to see the result.

The activity of our students led us to the idea of trying to ease the way to the next activity – creating our own ECOCONFERENCE at school. We decided to bring some useful tips on how to prepare such a conference on your own, active students can do it quite playfully:)

How to get started?

Here are the basic steps
(answer the following questions before you start):

1.

2.

3.

1. what is the aim of the ECO-conference?
(choose a topic and then what it should evoke or teach..e.g. soil, water, climate change, ocean, forests, etc.)

2. how many consecutive lessons are available?
(3 lessons are optimal – so we can fit in a film, a speaker, and one activity for example)

3. how many students do we want to involve in the conference?
(the whole school? just one year group? it is important to know the exact number of classes, ideally planning the program through the class numbers, using a formula to create the distribution of classes as they migrate to each program)

Topic tips:

water

Ocean

forests

Land

food waste

sustainability – circular economy

Biodiversity

energy

waste (digital, electronic, space, plastic, etc.)

Sustainability of tourism

Tips for films/documentaries:

The resources we provide offer fantastic short and longer documentaries on the subject – in English. Today, however, most films offer subtitles, so watching the films should not be a problem.

https://www.waterbear.com
(a large number of documents oriented on current social issues, just type the topic into the search engine and you will surely find your choice)

https://www.documentarymania.com
our movie tip: 2040

Here we provide tips on specific films that are available on streaming TV like Netflix, HBO, etc.
Our Oceans (Netfilx)
Plastic ocean (Youtube)
Blue Mission
Seaspiracy (Netflix)
Down to earth (Netflix series)
Don’t look up (Netflix)
Kiss the ground
Our Planet
The scale of hope

Tips for speakers

to try to reach, most of whom are also involved in education in schools:

Erik Balaz (Lesmir)

Jaroslav Blaško (Borrowed Planet)

Tomáš Šmátrala (Justice for Nature, Prales detem)

Zuzana Madajová (Free food – food waste)

Kristína Chaparro (Slovak Vegan Society)

Ivona Urbanová (Circular shield – circular economy)

Alexandra Madrova (Planet Lover)

Activity tips:

On this page you will find various tips for experiments, essays, worksheets, based on which you can prepare nice activities for the conference for different age groups.
https://climatescience.org/schools
We focus more on knowledge or search activities. We will give an example that you can happily apply. The result of this activity is that students, including teachers, learn quite interesting information in a non-violent way, in the field you choose for them, and do not perceive it as some fundamental form of learning.
Let’s take an example:
web: www.seaspiracy.org/facts, time: 15 min
assignment: divide into groups (max 4 people), and choose together 1 fact that the whole group agrees with. After the time is up, each group will present their fact, and give a reason why their particular one caught their attention. In this way, they go through a relatively large amount of interesting information, discussing it within the group, as there must be a consensus. You can then, for example, create a bulletin board from the selected facts and share these facts with others in the school.

Background for the ecoconference:

Background for the ecoconference

A very important part of the preparation of any conference is its promotion and the visual aspect of all relevant outputs. We have created a single graphic design manual that you can easily download and enter your details:

a poster to promote the conference and the programme (timetable of individual activities during the conference, including the venue of individual lectures/experiments/activities)
marking of rooms and speakers
name tags for speakers
methodology for running the conference
(to facilitate the rotation of classes to different activities = pre-prepared formulas in the form of a spreadsheet in which the school simply enters the classes and activities)
Eco-conference logo