We had to fix the sound on this a bit due to some problems that I caused the students (oops!), but it turned out fairly well inspite of that.

This one is shorter than the rest but is really kind of a neat demonstration of what you can do with no more than paper and a bit of cotton. The choice of materials was done entirely by the student so kudos to him.

The kids have been working on stop motion animation projects for the past few weeks. In between computer crashes, server problems, things not saving due to insufficient disk space and endless other technical problems, a couple of the videos have been finished. Here for your entertainment, are the first two.

One of my favorite online tools, Google Docs, has added a new feature, apparently, as of this morning. In their word processor section they’ve added an option to “insert drawing.” This nifty little feature allows you to create and insert simple drawings into your word processing documents. As with any other Google Doc, the drawings can be made collaboratively.

It seems that the feature is still a bit on the experimental side. While my browser will let me create the drawings in my document, my printer won’t let me print them. All I get is the text that I wrote and not the picture I tried to insert.

It’s perplexing, but I imagine it will all get sorted out in a few days.

When teaching kids about what effect they can have on the larger world, there’s three websites that come to mind. Free Rice is a simple little vocab game that lets you pick the correct definition for a fairly obscure word. For every correct guess, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program. In addition to English vocabulary drill, you can do words in German, Italian, French and Spanish as well as math.

New to the charity scene is Free Poverty which donates up to ten cups of water for every place you can locate in its geography quiz. The further you are from the site, the fewer glasses of water donated. At the moment it’s not clear who the donations are being funnelled through since Free Poverty seems to be “between” collaborating organizations.

Good Search is also a great place to go to make a difference. You choose the registered charity you want to support – it appears to be only American ones – and then using Yahoo! Search you hunt for whatever you’re after. Each search seems to donate about 1 cent to your charity. That may not seem like much, but imagine if 100 people in your school used this search service once per day for 200 school days per year. That would be a nifty $200 donation simply for searching the Internet. Good Search also shows you how to install their search box into your web browser (replacing the default box) and thereby makes it incredibly easy to donate money as you search.