What I'm Planning for Paperless Earth Day

A couple folks have asked what I'm planning to do for Paperless Earth Day. Here's the plan.

Our school sits on a pretty big plot of land. Rolling hills, two ponds, trees. Perfect locale for teaching environmental science, actually. Anyhow, both my West Civ and Latin classes have learned about ancient attitudes concerning nature: from the Homeric fury of the sea to the pastoral visions of Horace and from civilizations' first agriculturalists learning to tame the un-tame-able to Egyptians demanding of their Pharaoh the annual flood of the Nile, the history of civilization is the history of humankind's relationship with nature.

And so, we are planning to take a nature walk. And in preparation for our walk, each of our classes will be designing a 'Nature in History' wiki-scrapbook. The plan is to go out there into the great wilderness that is our campus and find bits of nature on our own grounds that lend themselves to telling the story of humankind's 'Nature Story'. Looking for metaphors in the dirt, as it were.

We'll be taking digital photos of what we find and publishing our findings, thinkings, and conversation on our wikis. It's up to the kids then to do with them what they want; the day's findings might form the basis of future projects, or you might see some of the elements of our investigation on the students' West Civ Proj blog.

Looking forward to hearing what all of you are planning for Paperless Earth Day. Hi-tech or Lo-tech, all ideas are welcome on Steve Katz's Paperless PD wiki. Let us know what's up in your neck of the woods.