Review: EdTechLens - Rainforest Journey

3/15/2016

Delight-filled cries of "WOW...Mom, come see this"! We've been using Rainforest Journey , a fun online science program from EdTechLens as part of our school day. Our focus has been on grade five materials.

EdTechLens is a life science program targeted at the Kindergarten through grade five levels. This is an on-line science program for elementary aged children. Their delight is in creating supplemental programs that are creative and engaging for their students. They want to help students learn as much as they want to help teachers track what their students are doing. When you sign up you will have a teacher page, and each of your students will have their own page.

On the teacher page you will find a host of materials to help you with your students.

On your page you will find such help as managing your class, hands-on activities, course outline, how to teach and the pedogogy of the course.

For my student his start up page looked like the picture below. As you can see five units of study. The primary sources section has a large number of videos (as does the blog) as well as interviews with the various team members. Each unit of study is further broken into chapters and assessments.

You can set up the class so the student can do the course in whatever order they want OR that they have to complete one set before they can move on to the next. As you can see my son mostly does the lessons in order, but occasionally skips ahead. He can easily see which lessons he's completed, and which ones he has yet to do.

Done green check

not done blue line

One of the interesting things about the program is how multi-faceted they have made it. They have audio options. As well as the option of printing off the entire lesson as a PDF. Each lesson has a quick question answer review.

It has so many little options to make it a really handy program.
One of the quirky things my lad commented on...the audio program spoke too slowly and wasn't the same as the written version.

How did my son use it?
I set him up. Had the computer remember his name and password. So all he had to remember was "B" and it filled in the blanks. YEAH for auto remembering. :)

He did one lesson a day, usually right after breakfast, sometimes before depending if it took me longer than usual to come in from doing chores. He would tell me what he learned about and we called it a day. I actually didn't even KNOW there were unit reviews until I did up the pictures for the review because well.. he never told me and I trust him to do his lessons. Has he done them? Haven't the foggiest, but does he know the material? Yes, so to me.. it's all good.

What did my son think?
"I like it."
"It's easy."
"The lessons are short."
"I like the pictures".

What did I think?:
The photography is stellar. It was really neat to see the clear, concise images. My lad particularly enjoyed the animals, and on the odd occasion we'd look up more information up about them.

They had so many photos as part of this science program. It was really good to see them as pictures are so worth a 1000 words. It was an excellent opportunity to good photography of the Rainforest biome. I loved how my boy would say, when I came in, things like "Mom, come see this... isn't this caterpillar funny"?

I particularly like that it's a safe program that has a logical run to it. Each lesson follows a similar format. Each lesson builds on the one before it.

I like that it gives alerts, so a student can see how they did on a quiz

In a nutshell what do I like about Rainforest Journey? My son seemed to enjoy it. He learned a few things (which is the point right?). He has no hesitations about loading it up and doing it, it worked equally well in all browsers and computers. I like the dual formats for doing lessons.. so if you can't do it at home and want to take a lesson on the road.. just print and go. They make it so easy. Great photography along with audio if you don't feel like reading. For how we used it, it is a great program and I'd happily recommend anyone else use it. :) I plan to have my son finish out the journey.

Product Details:
Vendor: EdTechLens
Product: Rainforest Journey
Received: One Year Subscription
For grade levels K, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5
Price: $50 per grade level for one year
Type: Supplemental Digital Science Program.