If you’re teaching astronomy to almost any grade, NASA Science is a site worth checking out. This bright, colorful site is chock full of pictures and features links to pretty nearly any NASA mission that might still be out in space somewhere and operational. That means you get about 10 years worth of missions you can learn about and explore. You can start your learning by studying the earth from space, the sun, the planets, or astrophysics in general.
Of course, as with any site, you have to approach with skepticism. The section on astrophysics suggests you can come in and “discover the origin, structure, and destiny of the Universe.” Now Science can do some grand things, but to teach me the “destiny” of the universe sounds a bit more like philosophy, or religion. What I’m trying to say is that this site, like all sites, has a bias, and you should watch for it as you browse. The kids might not spot it on their own because we’re all taught to believe science unquestioningly.
I’m not a math teacher, but I suffer from the same complaints that every math teacher does, “When are we ever going to use this stuff?”
For Math, at least, I have a partial answer. I discovered a site that’s trying to apply Math to real world baseball problems. They’re working out batting percentages and such based on the previous night’s games. It’s a neat approach because it makes math real. I like the approach. My only problem is that it’d be great to see a similar site done on hockey. That’d be much more useful for us Canadians.
For the science geek who loves Math, this remarkable site analyzes the original Star Trek series and the generally held belief that a disproportionate number of red shirted crew men died in various episode compared to other members of the crew.
Both sites make interesting use of statistics in a real world context, or at least what’s close to real since we’re talking about Star Trek after all.
In the past couple of weeks, both Intel and HP announced not bigger and better but smaller and less powerful laptops that they are going to be producing soon with release dates set as early as the end of the month.
The idea is to produce machines that are reasonably affordable for more people and to get them put to use by more and more schools. Apparently reasoning that most people don’t use the full power of a laptop computer anyway, these two companies are building what appear to be stripped down machines with slower processors, smaller hard drives, and smaller screens for less money.
After all, if all you’re doing with your laptop is word processing, watching YouTube, and sending e-mail, why pay for enough processing power to be able to do fancy graphic editing and powerful video and audio mixing?
I like the approach. I’ve noticed in the past couple of years that my old 3 megapixel camera is out of date, while my newer 6 megapixel SLR is also out of date. Neither has nearly the megapixels that most cameras that are currently available have. Yet, unless you’re blowing up your pictures to poster size, a 3 megapixel camera will do nicely, and a 6 is a luxury. Why pay for something you’ll fully never use like an 8 or 10 megapixel camera?
Making computers accessible to more people by offering them less makes sense. Most of us don’t need all the bells and whistles, and not having to pay for them should be great.
I’m not a math teacher, so I don’t normally have any graph paper lying around. I do, however, use it occasionally to have my classes make things like crosswords, or sometimes art classes use it to help set up a drawing. If you need graph paper but can’t find it, what do you do?
Believe it or not, this is actually a problem the Internet can solve. This online Graph Paper can be set to different styles, lines per inch, and even colors.
I don’t know who had so much time on their hands that they decided to supply a way to custom make graph paper, but it’s kind of handy.
Normally I’m not one to show off my students’ work to the greater world, but I’m going to make an exception. These three videos are not-bad applications of stop motion animations. While there’s some choppiness, some weird lighting, and other problems all three videos are not bad for a first try. The students (and me) are learning.
- Project One
- Project Two
- Project Three
I decided to post these on TeacherTube instead of YouTube because although TeacherTube seems a little bit clunkier at times, it also seems to get past more schools divisions’ web filters.
This project was also done on the cheap. Besides the computers (which the school already had), and Microsoft Movie Maker (already available if you’ve got Windows XP), we also used some really cheap webcams (found online at The Source), and some free stop motion animation software.
