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Recently, I took some time to explore Edutopia, another super website for educators. The George Lucas Foundation is the host of Edutopia. If you would like to read a little more from George Lucas himself, here’s a link to his views on the purpose of Edutopia in education.
It was really easy to find several videos of interest to me by narrowing my search to technology integration.
One of the videos I found of interest was titled Learning Landscape: Kids Monitor Terrain with Tech. It was about a classroom without walls project at  J.A Hughes Elementary in Red Lake Falls, Minnesota. Their school is near Glacial Ridge Wildlife Refuge, a recently developed prairie restoration project of the Nature Conservancy. Through the partnership of the school, a technology grant and the Nature Conservancy, the students of the school are now involved in monitoring the emergence of the prairie and sharing what they learn with scientists at the Nature Conservancy. This is a fantastic project that involves the students in real life, hands on learning with the right kind of technological equipment needed to do the job.
Each student is paired to particular plants and animals and they become the “go to” person or expert on them. Others rely on them to know their stuff, so it gives the students real incentive to learn. Another nice feature of this program is having the oldest students become the leaders who then pass on their knowledge to the lower grades so that the project can carry on from year to year.
Another very interesting video from Edutopia was in keeping with the vision that George Lucas has for the future of education. The title is No Gamer Left Behind: Virtual Learning Goes to the Next Level and it is an interesting bid for today’s schools to step up and embrace the idea that gaming can be turned to an advantage if students were allowed to learn through “playing games”. Some of the points that were made in this video were interesting, particularly the idea that when learning in a virtual world (in a medical field for instance) it is possible to “make mistakes without risk”. Rather than practicing on real patients, the simulations can provide realistic situations for students to learn and take risks without harm. One part of this video showed how a virtual game called Civilization engaged ten and eleven year old students so thoroughly that their grades in social studies improved considerably. Another feature was of a high school that changed its focus to bio-technology and digital media. The students there were not only designers but they also helped scientists to de-bug virtual programs that they were working on! This video is well worth checking out. I see the direction that education can take, and wonder sometimes how it can possibly all happen!

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