edtechtrain.com/NECC

Measuring Your Ecological Footprint and its Impact

Example of Technology Infused Instruction

Objectives:After taking an online quiz that calculates one’s ecological footprint, students will

• increase their awareness of their resource consumption and the impact that individual choices have on the health of our planet

• use a variety of technology tools to record and publish their findings about personal and group resource usage

• make suggestions for reducing their group’s ecological footprint

Related Standards:

NETS for Learners 2007 – Creativity & Innovation, Communication & Collaboration, Digital Citizenship, Technology Operations & Concepts

Bloom’s Taxonomy (revised 2001)

–Creating, Evaluating, Analyzing, Applying, Understanding, Remembering

Overview: Using prevailing technology, “The Ecological Footprint Quiz” (www.footprintnetwork.org) measures how fast one consumes natural resources and generates waste compared to how fast nature can absorb our waste and generate new resources. Using data from the personal footprint calculator (the quiz), students will calculate the amount of land area and water it takes to support their lifestyles. They will discover their biggest areas of resource consumption and learn what they can do to reduce their impact on the environment.

Process:1. Students take the footprint quiz at the Global Footprint Network

website (footprintnetwork.org). 2. Working in groups, create a Spreadsheet in GoogleDocs to compare

land and water usage of group members and to calculate the mean “footprint” of the group (in land and sea acreage). Analyze and graph the results for their group.

3. Upload images of various natural resources and/or byproducts of human consumption and explain their impact on the environment by creating a VoiceThread to accompany the images. sample voicethread

4. Create a wiki to publish images, VoiceThreads, and group findings along with recommendations and a list of strategies that could be used to reduce their ecological footprints.

Wrap Up:• Demonstrated how various tech tools and applications can

be used for discovery, analysis, evaluation and publishing around a specific topic.– used (the footprint calculator) as the jumping off point for the

exploration of environmental questions and issues.

• Challenged students to use higher order thinking skills, to refine their group skills, and to become meaningful contributors to the World Wide Web (via their wiki and/or VoiceThread).

• Global Footprint website could be integrated into units of study across the curriculum.

Questions:

1. What does VoiceThread have to offer educators? http://voicethread.com/about/

2. What do you do with a voicethread once you create it? 3. Why would you want students to create a voicethread? To

create a wiki? To use GoogleDocs? 4. What other curricular uses might there be for any of the

tools we utilized in today’s simulation?

edtechtrain.com/NECC

With professional development from ETT, we will teach (and support) educators

• to integrate tools like VoiceThreads and Wikis into their classroom instruction

• to increase both the efficiency of their instruction and its application to 21st century learning.