Forest App

The Forest App is an app used to help motivation. This is done by planting trees and setting a timer to keep your focus. Once you have created an account on this app you can plant trees and add friends to see how many trees they have planted and collaboratively work together so if one person kills a tree the whole ground trees are killed. When you leave the app the tree will be killed therefore keeping focus on school work and not social media, games, or other apps on your device.

This is a multiliterate tool as it shows the product of motivation through a medium other than school work. Students can keep track of how motivated they are through a timeline and also see when they are most motivated. It also can require communication between peers while working on projects or schoolwork and it can create a competition for students if they are wanting which can help them be more motivated. This app can help all students but will really benefit students who are easily distracted and find it hard to concentrate for a certain amount of time. There is no learning style or preference that this app appeals to as it can be used for all types. This is because it is a tool for motivation and focus not for studying material therefore it assists you with learning the work in whatever style you prefer.  You can set the amount of time so you can work in smaller increments or larger chunks of time.

Once you start an app, you will see a timer where you can set the time you want to plant the tree for. The longer you focus, the fancier the tree looks like. You can do as much trees you want in one day, there is no limit. If you successfully grow the tree, you will get the coins. You can gather them to buy more beautiful trees.

I haven’t used the app for long but when I was using it earlier this year, I planted 118 trees and made my own small forest for myself. I had to use some apps sometime for emergency so I burnt 3 trees down ):

If you purchase the pro version of the app, you can connect to your friends and compete with other users around the world. Also, you can plant ACTUAL TREES on earth. You can gather the coins and if you use them, someone else will plant the tree for you so it is an ‘eco-friendly’ motivation app. Lastly, you can set up some apps that you really have to use. Unnecessary apps will be blocked but some important ones such as calculator, emails, calls will be allowed as long as you don’t get interrupted by them.

Some cons to the app is that you can turn off the feature which causes the trees to die when you leave the app. This takes away the accountability as you would still be able to leave the app to go on social media, play games, etc. Also if you have more than one device than you would have to set the app on all devices and this also doesn’t work on computers. In the classroom students could have to set the time and put their phones on the desk or in a certain spot where the teacher can see to help them stay off their phones.

 

I had my old high school chemistry teacher actually use this app in her classroom. She did it on her own phone and asked students to give her a certain amount of time of focus and if she felt the students were being off task then she would close the app and kill the tree. I only watched her kill a tree once and everytime she brought it out the students seemed more motivated than when there was no accountability. I feel as though it may have been more successful if students were allowed to use their own phones so they would be distracted by them.

Photo taken from unsplash by Gustav Gullstrand