"The War on Weeds", Connected, level 2, November 2018

05 November 2018

The article shows how students can use digital technology to become citizen scientists and act locally on a national issue.

You can find the article and the teaching notes here:

Environmental information services – NIWA collects and manages significant amounts of New Zealand's environmental data particularly in the climate, freshwater, marine, and atmosphere domains.
What is the environmental impact of a data center? – This article discusses the negative effects of data collection centres on the environment.

Describe the relationship between the technology used in this project to create the NZ database and the made, natural, and social world.
What are some of the environmental issues that have influenced the way they have developed a digital recording system for the weeds?
How do you think they may have kept records of weeds in the past?
What are the positive impacts of monitoring weed growth as described in this project?
Technology does not always have a positive impact on the environment. What do you think could be a negative impact on the environment as we are able to collect more and data on digital devices?

Component	Indicator	Level
Characteristics of technology	describe the relationship between technology and the made, natural, and social world identify social and/or environmental issues that may have influenced particular technological practices and/or the attributes of outcomes produced describe how particular technological outcomes have changed over time and identify if this resulted in changing how people do things describe examples to illustrate when technology has had a positive impact on society and/or the environment describe examples to illustrate when technology has had a negative impact on society and/or the environment.	2
Technological area	Progress outcome
Designing and developing digital outcomes	PO 1: In authentic contexts and taking account of end-users, students participate in teacher-led activities to develop, manipulate, store, retrieve, and share digital content in order to meet technological challenges. In doing so, they identify digital devices and their purposes and understand that humans make them. They know how to use some applications, they can identify the inputs and outputs of a system, and they understand that digital devices store content, which can be retrieved later.

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