green – iLearn Technology

Plan It Green: build an energy efficient model city

January 17, 2017January 16, 2017Kelly Tenkely1 Comment15148 views

What it is: Plan It Green, the Big Switch is an online game/simulation from National Geographic that allows students to create their own energy-efficient city of the future. In the game, students build new energy technologies and advance energy research; gain points based on their eco-friendliness, energy production, and citizen happiness; compete with others for the highest city rating; tackle challenges and quests; and explore and build a diverse energy portfolio. Through Plan It Green, students begin to better understand various energy options and can experiment with different energy sources and see their impact through this game/simulation.

How to integrate Plan It Green, the Big Switch into the classroom: This game from National Geographic is a great way to help your students understand different kinds of energy, and think through the ways that the energy we rely on in our daily lives impact the environment. Use Plan It Green, the Big Switch as a provocation for an inquiry unit about energy. The game could be a great catalyst for further research and understanding of energy options and how our decisions impact the rest of the ecosystem. Students can test out theories in this SIM-City like game and watch the way their decisions impact citizens and the larger ecosystem.

Plan It Green would also be a great way to end a unit, after students have learned about different types of energy. This game would be a great simulation reflection to see how different decisions about energy play out.

If you don’t have access to a 1:1 environment, this would make a great center on classroom computers during a study on energy or even for whole-class play on an interactive whiteboard throughout a unit on energy.

I like the way Plan It Green puts students in control of decisions and shows them the consequences (or unintended consequences) of those decisions.

Tips: The downfall of Plan It Green is that it requires a Flash Player, so while students can register for the site using an iPad, actual play requires a Flash enabled browser.

An inquiry into sharing the planet: embodied energy awesomeness

March 18, 2013Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2871 views

You may think that when I’m not posting here regularly, it is because I’ve run out of cool new technology to share…or maybe I’m just being lazy…or tired of blogging. While I’ve had moments of the latter two, it really boils down to the 24 hours I have in a day. Sometimes I choose sleep!

This week, I’ve been pulling together our last inquiry block of the year at Anastasis. I can’t believe that we are down to counting weeks before we say goodbye for the summer.

Our last inquiry block is an inquiry into sharing the planet. For our 6th through 8th graders the focus is: “People can choose to take specific actions to help conserve Earth’s resources.” Each time I put together an inquiry guide for teachers, I am sure to offer plenty of more detailed questions that they can use to help guide the inquiry. Below are some of the questions I included.

What can people do to help conserve Earth’s resources?
What are other countries doing to help/hurt conservation?
How does United States demand impact Earth’s resources?
What country has the most impact on Earth’s resources/the least? Why do you think this is?
Is conservation a political issue?
What is ecological overshoot?
What is embodied energy?

I love helping teachers craft the opportunities for students to be curious, to dig into learning. During this planning, I found the following resources that are too good not to share!

What it is: Embodied Energy free ebook download. Created by a design firm, this ebook does a nice job explaining embodied energy.

How to use the Embodied Energy ebook in the classroom: This ebook is a well designed book that will introduce students to the energy that we don’t see in the objects around us. This pdf can be projected for a whole class, downloaded on individual student devices or, if you must, printed out. Use this ebook along with the Sustainability by Design TED talk playlist to spark student interest into embodied energy and how it can impact the decisions we make every day.

These introductory activities led me to the Energy Trumps project. This is a design project by the Agency of Design that looked at using design to help people better understand, and take-in-to-account, the way that we build, design and consume. I absolutely love the idea of students working together as a class to study a variety of materials. Each student could create one (or several) of their own embodied energy trading cards to help others understand the environmental impacts of materials. Students can research key environmental properties of materials including embodied energy, embodied carbon, embodied water, recycled content, extraction intensity and years of reserves. These can be used to compare materials at a glance. (If you purchase the cards created by Agency of Design, you get the added bonus of an augmented reality feature that brings the material properties to life to explore in 3D. Students can test out the different amounts of material they can get for one megajoule of energy.)

Take this a step further and ask students how they can use that information to help design a more sustainable future. How can they hack every day objects? How can they change the way that society builds, consumes, etc.?

How can the idea of embodied energy be communicated to a larger audience so that more of the picture is taken into account by the average consumer?

Any time I create a new inquiry block, I work to remember that we are in the business of apprenticing change makers. These students matter and WILL change the world. I love reminding students that age does not have to act as a restriction for world change.

Felix Finkbeiner is a student in Germany (similar in age to these Anastasis students) who is changing the world in HUGE ways. Felix’s Plant for the Planet initiative has started a movement of planting trees…millions of them! Read the an article about Felix here.

Felix has also addressed the United Nations with a speech to open the International Year of Forests which can be viewed here.

Students can use this embodied energy calculator to explore their own curiosities.

The Happy Planet Index is a fantastic way to discover the extent to which 151 countries across the globe live happy and sustainable lives based on their efficiency, how many long and happy lives each produces per unit of environmental input. Data can be viewed in map or table format.

I love the potential that a new inquiry block holds. We offer guidance and some starting places to spark interest, but where students find passion is always exciting to watch unfold. We truly are in the midst of genius in our students!

The other reason to love inquiry? The brilliant way that it allows room for transdisciplinary exploration, and touches each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I mean really, how can you beat learning that looks like life?

Print What You Like

August 13, 2010Kelly Tenkely12 Comments7020 views

What it is: I don’t know about you, but printers can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, if you have one, your students are able to print out their work and finished projects; on the other, printers also make for a lot of wasted pages and ink when students (or teachers) are printing from the Internet. Print What You Like solves this problem by letting you format any web page for printing. No more pages of ads, empty space, and the extras that you didn’t want. Print What You Like works in three easy steps: 1. Go to Print What You Like and paste the URL of the page you want to print, 2. Edit the page, 3. Print it! Very easy and a great way to cut down on paper waste! I like that there is nothing to download with Print What You Like, it runs directly from your browser. You can make the page you are printing more readable by changing font size and typeface and removing the background. Print What You Like gives you the ability to combine multiple web pages by editing them and printing them as one document. You can even save your modified page as a PDF or HTML document…so cool! If you sign up for the service, you can even save the changes you make to a page so that other pages from the same site are automatically formatted the same (I’m thinking this would be great for recipe sites!).

How to integrate Print What You Like into your curriculum: Introduce students and other teachers to Print What You Like for printing web pages. Post instructions for using Print What You Like next to classroom computers, printers, and in the computer lab (I have attached the instructions card that I created for Print What You Like below. Feel free to print it out and use it in your classroom or computer lab). Make it even easier to use Print What You Like and add it to the bookmark bar in your favorite browser or add the bookmarklet editor directly to your browser.

Tips: If you have a website that students are constantly printing from, consider adding a printer friendly button that creates a printer friendly version of your website with the click of a button.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Print What You Like in your classroom!

Emerald Island

April 20, 2009Kelly Tenkely2 Comments2203 views

What it is: Emerald Island is a great place for kids to play and learn more about the earth and ways that they can help the earth, perfect for Earth Day! Emerald Island is a virtual world created specifically for kids (6-12). Students can pioneer, prevail over, and protect the Island. Emerald Island is more than just a game, it is a story that students take part in. The students job is to help Tamino (the hero) to save Emerald Island (a green island) from Pirats (pirate rats). Each player plants seeds and cultivates gardens to replenish Emerald Island. Emerald Island helps students to learn about and experience important contributions that are part of an interconnected world. It provides young students with a sense of community and a beginning understanding of a global society. Students begin to build knowledge, empathy, and appreciation for an environment that emulates earth. While playing, students are empowered to make a difference and become true eco-heroes as they take on challenges to save the world. Along the way students meet other citizens of Emerald Island, many of whom give students tips about how they can save energy and be more responsible citizens.

How to integrate Emerald Island into the classroom: Emerald Island is a great game for students to play throughout the month of April as they learn about Earth Day and how to become more earth-conscious citizens. I love how Emerald Island involves students in a story and a quest to save a planet. On the way they learn about how they can be better citizens of our planet with helpful tips from the Emerald Island citizens. The games and activities help students to develop problem solving, reasoning, social, and computer skills. Emerald Island can be played as a whole class exploring and reading clues together with an interactive whiteboard or individually in a computer lab setting. You can expand on what students are learning in Emerald Island by keeping a class notebook of green tips that students learn in Emerald Island.

Tips: Emerald Island provides an outstanding introduction to registering for a website, it is easy enough to use with young students and reinforces Internet safety rules before the game begins.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Emerald Island in your classroom.