The Teachers' Tech Lounge Exploring the wise use of tech to increase student achievement 

Came across this site thanks to the good folks over at YPluse (they have a terrific mailing list – if you don’t subscribe, you should!) As organizations worldwide recognize & celebrate Earth Day (click here for the history of the event on Wikipedia and note that some of the content is disputed…interesting!) schools everywhere will be featuring related lessons and activities. Scholastic’s Virtual Forest Challenge has been created to illustrate how the changes we make in our daily lives impact the environment.  It’s been done before, but, I think Scholastic has a pretty good interactive here:

The instructions are simple: your avatar is guided (you don’t control it) through a virtual representation of a typical home, school, store and park, where…

… a series of questions are presented:

… which are then scored and totalled at the end and expressed as a percentage of “Forest Health,” presumably the impact on the forest based on the lifestyle choices made. The questions themselves vary from the straightforward, tried-and-true ones we’ve already seen to several that are “updated” for the times and even a couple that I’ve not seen before. Interactivity isn’t the site’s main appeal, in my view, though – the graphics are pleasing and the navigation is intuitive, but it’s just a bit to “2D” for me! This activity could easily be supplemented however with discussions of particular questions or perhaps even web-based research to answer related questions. In fact a teacher could go through all the questions in advance and structure a lesson around it!

There’s more, though – this activity is just the beginning – Scholastic (like everyone else these days!) is trying to build community:

As you can see, the Virtual Forest Game is just one of several offerings, including a large selection of teacher resources (Scholastic really knows how to do these things right!), moderated discussion boards,quizzes, and this VERY cool “Act Green” collaborative activity:

A class could easily integrate this into a series of lessons involving a range of topics. Very nicely done! Check it out for yourself!