Health and the Environment
Quest - Can we shrink the headings and PCSD title/logo so they do not take up the whole opening screen? Were we going to use the fancy cursive PCSD "Sustainable America" title? Should we shrink the photo slightly to make it fit a little better?
Affiliated and Concurrent Events task - The logo should be smaller as it leaves a bit of blank space around the paragraph to the left of it (if we want, I could go through and change all the logo sizes as it is easy to do with my machine). Would the link for "Ecosystem Health" be more appropriate in the section on "Conservation of Nature" since it deals with the whole ecosystem level instead of the organism, stream, air as an individual part of the ecosystem? The toxicology conference should link to the NTM database entry which might give a longer description of the event.
Case Studies - a few of these do not relate in the appropriate manner (esp. "Energy Star") because the talk about energy efficiency case studies at facilities related to "Health and the Environment" rather than case studies directly related to "Health and the Environment." I suggest that we supplement these ones with case studies that relate to water and air quality in a given region (if we can find something like that).
Links - The "Learning Links" logo seems out of place and it is unclear why it is used. I will reiterate that the "TM" tends to make folks in the educational sector wary of corporate agendas. I suggest adding the EPA's Office for Pollution Prevention and Toxics in this section. Also, we should include in the instructions something that would inspire more synthesis of information from students (this could be a more universal comment that applies to many tasks in several of the quests). We should edit these links to leave only those that are explicitly related to the topic area ("EnviroLinks" would go).
H & E Interactive Activities - The "1-Week Curriculum" does not directly relate to the NTM Goal as it is worded. The rest seem pretty solid. The last one, though, should have more text or could link directly to this site a few links downstream.
Web-based Interactive Activities - I am not sure I understand the difference between this task and the previous one. I thought that these would have some sort of ASP file or another interactive homepage, but the second one does not (in fact it does not seem to be interactive at all). SolarQuest Challenge - Challenges #3 and 4 do not relate to the NTM Goal as written. The other two are solid. The SQ Challenge Registry link inthe "Other Website" section leads to an error message, but when it works it should lead directly to the "SQ Challenge Registry" words in the instructions. Discussion Activity - This is solid as is.
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