I’ve been trying to come up with a pithy little introduction here, but really all we wanted to share is that we’ve put together a short(ish) movie as an introduction to Digital Frog International’s educational software programs. We think it does a pretty good job explaining what you get with a DFI program, the range and depth of topics we cover and why you and your students can benefit from our software.

So grab some popcorn, but your feet up for a few minutes and let us show you what you get with a Digital Frog product. And if you’re really inspired, you can head over to our DemoWare pages to get your free demo versions to try for yourself.

(If you’ve never checked out the Digital Frog YouTube channel, you can find a growing number of videos, from sample dissection videos from The Digital Frog 2.5 to the shockingly popular time-lapse of a decomposing rabbit, with more going up in the coming months.)

This month, we’re offering the home version of The Digital Field Trip Series DVD for just $66. That’s all three Digital Field Trips‚ÄîThe Wetlands, The Rainforest, and The Desert‚Äîat 33% off the already low regular price of the DVD, and over 50% off the price of buying all three field trips separately.

Normally, we charge $45 per title for each Digital Field Trip. For the month of December, for just $21 more you’ll get all three Digital Field Trips on one DVD, containing both the Windows AND Macintosh versions. There has never been a better and more affordable way to bring the wonders of the world’s ecosystems to your children than this.

The DVD is licensed for home use and contains full versions of all three Digital Field Trips in the series. Each field trip contains virtual-reality trips to the ecosystem to allow you and your children to visit it digitally, as well as a wealth of other modules covering everything from its plants and animals, the processes that keep it functioning, as well as more general natural science and geography topics in an fun, interactive and engaging way.

The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands
Wetland ecology without getting your feet wet, including sections on food webs, nutrient cycles and photosynthesis.

The Digital Field Trip to The Rainforest
Rainforest ecology, from the rainforests of the world to interdependencies, botany and human impact.

The Digital Field Trip to The Desert
Deserts of North America and around the world, with in-depth sections on adaptations, homeostasis and landscape formation.

The special is available exclusively in our online store through December 31, 2008.

(You can also download free limited demo versions of all of the Digital Field Trips if you want to preview them before buying. But act fast, The offer ends at the end of the year.)

For once, the weather gods were on our side and we managed to catch the fall colors at their peak, But perhaps the most special experience for me was finally getting to visit Cloud Lake. Of course I have visited it digitally hundreds of times as it is the location for The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands, but this was the first time I had actually been there.

Our developers chose the location for several reasons, not the least being the stunning scenery, which is even more beautiful in the fall. With clear blue skies and incredible colors, it was an unforgettable experience. Perhaps the most surreal experience is listening to the loons. My ever patient brother-in-law spent hours on Little Joe Lake patiently filming a surprisingly bold loon, capturing its eerie cry on tape.

As the name implies, Cloud Lake is at a fairly high elevation on the Centennial Ridges Trail, so it was a somewhat challenging climb for my poor old body, but worth every aching bone! Our goal was to secrete a metal box with several copies of The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands for intrepid geocachers to locate using GPS technology. If you do not know about geocaching, check out www.geocache.com – it is a great way to discover out-of-the way gems that most people never find and a fabulous way to teach children about geography and nature. And plan to visit Cloud Lake soon. We intend to keep the cache stocked with CDs.

To mark the start of the new school year, we are offering parents and teachers the gift of free software. Namely our World Summit award-winning cell biology program ScienceMatrix: Cell Structure and Function. Until Oct. 31, 2008, any purchases made in our online store with a cart subtotal of $45 or more will earn you a free copy of ScienceMatrix.

Spend between $45 and $199, and you’ll receive a single user license, worth $49.

If your cart’s subtotal is between $200 and $599, we’ll send you a Lab Pack (5 CDs), worth $122.50.

And if you spend $600 or more, you will receive a building site license for ScienceMatrix, giving you use of the program on an unlmited number of computers at one site, worth $399.

The offer ends October 31, 2008 and is available only through The Digital Frog Online Shop.

The Digital Field Trip to The Desert, however, became our most ambitious of the series. Team members spent weeks in the deserts of the southwest US to collect media, talk to experts, and bring back as much of the experience into the program to make it as accurate and representative as possible. As the program’s project manager, I was lucky enough to go on a few of these, spending a few nights camping in the desert at Texas’ Big Bend National Park (and waking up to find one of our SUV’s tires was flat), exploring the expansive salt flats of northern Nevada and almost running out of gas in the middle of Death Valley while out photographing sand dunes. I was also able to take a few working holidays to more far-flung deserts‚ the edges of the Sahara from both Morocco and Egypt, and the desert regions of southern Israel and Jordan.

By far one of the most impressive deserts I have been able to visit is the Namib Desert in the southern African country of Namibia. It is the oldest desert in the world and possibly the driest. It has some of the world’s largest sand dunes and a surprising wealth of wildlife, from welwitchia plants that can be hundreds of years old to herds of elephants that cross the harsh desert annually. It’s a harsh, but little known and incredibly beautiful environment.

It’s also one that is not fully understood or protected. This is something that the Namibian government is looking to change, by protecting vast swaths of the Namib Desert to connect the country’s two other protected parks: Skeleton Coast, a vast expanse on the western coast of the country where the sand dunes reach the sea, and Etosha national park, known for its incredible range of wildlife from small deer like the Springbok to the larger mammals from wildebeest to elephants, lions the endangered black rhino. This new park would effectively create a 15-million acre corridor for wildlife between the two existing parks and be one of the largest protected areas in the entire world.

To assist in is creation, recently the lead scientist for The Nature Conservatory, Dr. M. A. Sanjayan, led an expedition to cross the Namib Desert‚ 300 km of it, on foot. This daunting, 14-day journey was done to conduct a conservation assessment of everything from identifying the movement of animals to mapping little visited locations to locate waterholes, and even assess how tourism could be brought to this remote area with minimal impact on the fragile environment.

While they just recently completed the expedition, the entire journey has been documented on their web site and makes for a fascinating read. They get off to an inauspicious start, ranging from inevitable technical problems with equipment to losing three of their nine camels before even setting out. (One is too old, one became pregnant and one was eaten by lions, which, since the camels were imported from Australia, Sanjayan theorizes is probably the first time in history an Australian camel has faced and lost to a lion).

With accompanying videos and slideshows, it’s an interesting exploration of a fascinating ecosystem that few of us will get to experience first-hand. (Although I can recommend it if the opportunity ever arises.)

We visited Montreal this weekend and could not tear our three year old grandchildren away from my laptop. They were totally absorbed in the Rainforest Dependency Web Game and learned a surprising amount by “reading” silhouettes. And yet this same game is challenging even for adults.

As for the text, it is written clearly and succinctly and supported by context-sensitive definitions and integrated text-to-speech to help early readers, ESL learners and auditory learners.

Another teacher purchased a Building Site License for ScienceMatrix: Cell Structure and Function last year and told us that her students scored higher marks on this subject than any other class she has ever taught.

A special ed teacher was extremely excited about our Digital Field Trip series to help his mixed grade class of 7 to 12 year olds.

Of course, our goal in attending these conferences is to showcase our products to teachers who have never seen them before, but we get energized by stories from teachers who are using the products. One experienced biology teacher approached our booth with some reluctance having been asked to check out dissection alternatives by his colleagues. We showed him The Digital Frog 2.5 and he then admitted that he had been completely biased against all dissection alternatives, but was now planning on recommending a district-wide purchase!

I was asked at the last minute to present The Digital Frog 2.5 at a presentation hosted by Animalearn (who loan out dissection alternatives free of charge, including The Digital Frog 2, their most popular loan item). Although The Digital Frog 2.5 has been rated the best dissection alternative many times, we do not consider it a dissection alternative program. It’s an anatomy and physiology learning tool, supported by an interactive frog dissection. After all, the ultimate goal of dissecting in schools is to help students understand their own bodies, not to teach them how to wield a scalpel.