5 Green Tricks For The Digital Classroom
- Diana Bidulescu
- Apr 22, 2015
- 3 min read
April 22 is Earth Day. Here are a few tricks that you can turn into year-round green practices for your expanding digital classroom and celebrate Earth Day every day!
Go Paperless Paper comes from trees, right? Cutting less trees means less pollution, more oxygen, less weather changes, less landslides, and a future where our children can still enjoy a walk in the woods. Substitute handouts for digitouts (no, not a real word, but sounds fun!) with the myriad of tools out there. You can start with a simple doc in Office 365, GDrive, Livebinders, etc; get them to your students and back via LMS (examples of free ones here), Drive or email; run them through Turnitin to save yourself the plagiarism search; follow up with a quick Socrative or Nearpod for instant feedback and assessment, or even get them graded! This will free up some exploration time for you and your students and you can end your class in another part of the world with one of the tools below. Real world in no time!
Travel the world
Show your students the real savannah, have them walk through the rainforest, take them through Times Square, show them a real iceberg. Start conversations about real places and real issues, and ask them to find solutions. PBL anyone? Skype in the Classroom will give you real people on the other side of the camera (they can show you their world and talk about issues there, you can show them yours or help them find solutions); GoogleEarth and Nasa will let you explore without leaving the room, Reach the World and Polar Husky take your students on adventures via unique travel guides. Seeing is believing! Show your students the world, why and what they should preserve and build your Green Team!
Give & Get
Recycle and fundraise with fun programs that give you back cash or products. Aim for programs that help you recycle more than just paper; look for fun programs like Funding Factory which help you recycle anything from empty ink cartridges to devices. Recycle your school’s and community's Apple devices with Apple Recycling Program and get funds for more apps that can help you have fun discovering the world behind the classroom walls.
Use Simulations
Every frog counts! They eat bugs (little environmentalists aren’t they?) and make cute patio palls for your little ones. Dissecting them, while for a good learning cause, can be avoided by using simulations like the Virtual Frog Dissection Kit or Animalearn. They’re clean, safe, affordable, (and scentless)! Simulate earth movements with animations.
Advocate
One can never have enough writing opportunities, right? How about use environmental issues to spur your students’ creativity? Use Smithsonian, Discovery Education and National Geographic to help your students understand what a documentary is and how informational visuals support advocacy; have them pick an endangered animal or plant, research interesting facts about it, write a script and create an infomercial to advocate for their chose topic. Children who are aware of environmental issues AND use their voice and creativity to create awareness in others develop great communication and reasoning skills, are more interested in reading and writing (have improved comprehension for math), perform better in school, are more confident, and grow up to be caring, involved community members.
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