Adobe Show Your Impact Feature: Potomac Highlands Watershed School

TechSoup and Adobe announced the winners of the Show Your Impact design contest at the very end of May. Since then, we've been featuring the winners and runners-up in each of the four main categories. We ran the contest for a couple of reasons —  to show off the amazing work of these nonprofits and libraries and also to inspire the work of others. You can see the previously featured winners here and here.

This week, we are featuring the Potomac Highlands Watershed School educational website created by the Cacapon Institute. They are the winner of the environmental impact category in "other media." Here's some of their submission essay:

Cacapon Institute’s Internet-based Potomac Highlands Watershed School (2005) was designed for K-12 classrooms, with lessons tied to required curriculum to educate students at various levels about protecting rivers and the watershed environment. While the website is built on a FrontPage platform, the eSchool owes its look and much of its personality to Adobe products: Illustrator, Flash, and Photoshop. The school was designed to look like an old-time, Appalachian schoolhouse. The outside view and classroom interiors were drawn using Illustrator. The outside background and the classroom window views were a digital photograph modified in Photoshop.

The school was designed to be engaging and invite exploration and learning, but not to be overly cute or require a fast Internet connection. That drove the decision to make the pages static, with hotlinks embedded in the classroom images.

The e-school is used by schools free of charge throughout the world, including one teacher in Bangkok who used the Flash lessons in an English as a Second Language class. Over a four year span, they have engaged over 2000 high school students from throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed for a month in the "high school." Congratulations to Capacon on their success!

The two runners-up in the category were The WildCare Nature Van and The Mono Lake Committee Website.

The nature van is a fun example of what creative minds can do. They covered a van in vivid images of wild animals by wrapping it in vinyl. If you are an educator in the San Francisco Bay Area, I encourage you to contact WildCare and arrange to introduce your students to them. Each year they treat nearly 4000 wild animals of more than 200 species in their wildlife hospital; teach over 40,000 children and adults in their nature education programs, and help people negotiate the boundaries between humans and wildlife with their Humane Wildlife Solutions service and Living with Wildlife Hotline.

The Mono Lake Committee, though operating in a remote rural location, has always been on the cutting edge—creating new precedents in state water law, helping make Los Angeles and California more efficient through water conservation and water recycling, educating thousands of students and visitors each year, and protecting and restoring Mono Lake for future generations. Their new website, designed and maintained by their staff with Adobe products from Techsoup, communicates their message in a fresh, inspiring way—that makes people fall in love with, stay connected to, and protect this place for generations to come.

Check out their submissions and the other winners and runners up on the Show Your Impact site. And we encourage you to show your support for their local work with a donation to their programs: Cacapon, WildCare, and The Mono Lake Committee. Congrats to all!