Recently arriving in my mailbox was a DVD from the Digital Frog. This is a really fun alternative for gaining information about echo systems without traveling to one, reading a textbook, or watching it on television. The DVD takes the user on three digital field trips: the wetlands, the rain forest and the dessert. Each one is packed with an amount of information that is difficult to describe.
Every field trip is laid out with four prompts to investigate each of the systems. The prompts are study, which contains general information about the system, followed by types, for instance temperate vs. tropical rainforest's, next, mechanisms which covers things likes water, rocks, minerals, soil etc, finally human impact.
Within the prompts are layers and layers of additional information about topics,subtopics, more topics and more subtopics. Sound complicated? It really isn't and is an easy system to navigate. I would say that the amount of information contained in each of these ecosystems can be a bit overwhelming. One could easily devote hours to surfing within just one ecosystem. I would not consider this to be a curriculam, but a fantastic, well laid out multi medai tool for research and exploration.
It is evident that this field trip series has taken hours of thought and a tremendous amount of work. The quality of the information, graphics, sound effects must have taken years to produce. One of the most helpful features of the Digital Frog is that you can click on any word and get a definition which really brings the understandability level up, great feature if you are delving into this topic for the first time.
The field trip portion was the clear favorite of my kids. One begins with a map and numbers. Click on the number and you are taken to a close up screen shot of the area. Adjacent to that are field notes with details about that particular area, a journal if you will.
Next year my daughter will be in third grade and I am all ready to go with My Fathers World Exploring Countries and Cultures, the science has an ecosystem focus. I see it tying in nicely to that program and her being able to glean quite a good deal from this product.
The Digital Frog can be purchased at http://digitalfrog.com/ for $199.
Members of the TOS Crew received a free DVD for review purposes
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We reviewed & loved this program! My kids took it to their room and didn't come out for over an hour... ahhh heaven! lol
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