Instructify

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

The recent oil spill in the gulf reminds me of one of my dad’s favorite sayings: “Invest in your space program. Eventually we’re gonna need to get the heck out of here.” Well, since 1998 the governments of Russia, the United States, Japan, and several European nations have made a huge combined investment in the International Space Station. I had to admit, it’s been a while since I checked in on its progress, but the ISS has gone from something that looked like a big flashlight to a structure larger that a Boeing 767!

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BY BILL FERRIS

Want to start next fall’s science class with a bang? You won’t find many bangs bigger than a supernova. NASA wants to bring those colossal explosions to your classrooms via the safety of a DVD through their Journey to the Stars DVD giveaway.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

I used to think that the definitive YouTube video about our universe was Eric Idle’s Galaxy Song, but now I have to admit the good people at the American Museum of Natural History have raised the bar with their “The Known Universe” video that, in the simplest of terms, is like a universe-sized version of Google Earth on steroids. It’s about seven minutes long and just kind of mind boggling in scope.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

It’s tough to put into words how cool Stellarium is for anyone teaching astronomy or anyone learning the subject. In a nutshell, Stellarium is a high-resolution personal planetarium you install on your computer. The fact that is 100% free launches it into the Google Earth realm of awesome free applications.

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BY BILL FERRIS

The world may be getting smaller, but the universe is still a pretty big place. If you’ve the urge to feel like an insignificant speck of dust, play with this flash app that shows you the scale of the universe.

The controls are simple. Actually, make that control, as in singular — move the slider back and forth to zoom through the universe’s spectrum of size, from the boundaries of the known universe itself all the way down to quantum foam, whatever that is. (more…)

Here’s what’s going on at the NASA Earth Observatory, brought to you by Fred Beyer at EarthSciTeach.

World of Change: Yellow River Delta
Once free to wander up and down the coast of the North China Plain, the Yellow River Delta has been shaped by levees, canals, and jetties in recent decades.

Water Watchers
In Idaho, NASA’s Landsat satellites are helping officials manage water resources and settle conflicts.

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BY EMILY JACK

In Europe in the early 1600s, witch hunts were common practice and people were burned at the stake. Health care included bloodletting and surgery without anesthesia. And expeditions to the so-called New World were launching a new era of cruelty and genocide. But even during those dark times, a scientific revolution was underway that would change the way humans understood themselves and their place in the world forever.

It was 1609 when Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the skies and began the observations that ushered in modern astronomy. 400 years later, the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO have declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy to honor Galileo and to celebrate the advances in astronomy since his time.

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BY BILL FERRIS

One of the first lessons I learned as a kid was not to look at the sun. As lessons go, it was a pretty easy one to learn, since ignoring it kinda hurts. Extreme astronomer Gary Palmer wants you to disregard that advice and take a good long look into that burning ball of hellfire via the safety of your computer monitor at his site, The Sun in Motion.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

Understandably, this summer has included a lot of reminiscing about the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing, as this year was its 40th anniversary. Since it’s also the International Year of Astronomy, I thought a review of a really cool website related to the moon landing was in order. A really spectacular resource I’ve found is called We Choose the Moon, a multimedia, interactive site created by the JFK Presidential Library.

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.

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BY NICK YINGLING

According to the plot summary for Teen Wolf on Wikipedia, “High school student Scott Howard is seventeen years old, sick of being average and wishing he were special… Scott keeps undergoing changes and eventually undergoes a complete change and becomes a wolf… During the final basketball game, Scott refuses to “wolf out” and insists on winning the game on his own.”

Isn’t that heart-warming? The message is just be yourself!

So, what does Teen Wolf have to do with anything here? (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Want to feel insignificant? No, you say? I’ll take that as a yes.

If you were already feeling like a tiny speck of dust in the universe, these YouTube¹ videos will show you just how tiny we are in the grand scheme of the universe. Each video sizes up Earth against the larger planets in the solar system, and the sun, which in turn gets dwarfed by the hypergiant stars in our galaxy.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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The early buzz about the world wide web was that it would throw open the floodgates of the world’s accumulated knowledge, creating a window into the cultures of the most far-flung places on earth. We instead got lolcats, pop-up ads, and meaningless quizzes about which superhero you are.

Fortunately, some wise folks had an eye on that original idyllic vision all along, and those folks now bring us the World Digital Library. A project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the site provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.

These cultural treasures include maps, photographs, manuscripts, audio and video recordings and more, and there’s at least one item from every UNESCO member country. The WDL’s interface is phenomenal, offering beautiful, high-resolution scans with incredible zooming capability. Check out this 18th century Japanese woodblock print; you can zoom in close enough to see individual paper fibers.

The site is also exceptionally easy to navigate — perhaps dangerously so, if you like looking at pretty pictures and are prone to losing track of time. You can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, or contributing institution, and the site is navigable in seven different languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The possibilities for using the WDL in the classroom are nearly endless: Social studies teachers, obviously, will find a treasure trove of primary source materials, but they can also show works created contemporaneously from around the globe for any era, enabling students to develop a holistic sense of global history. Second-language teachers can have students view culturally significant items in their target language. English language arts teachers can identify exquisite images, audio, and video for use as writing prompts. And the ability to browse by topic provides opportunities for use by those often-neglected STEM teachers: Among the topics to choose from is “natural science and mathematics,” which can be further limited to astronomy, geometry, medicine, physics, etc.

An entry under the topic “mathematical geography” is a 15th-century Egyptian book called A Guide for the Perplexed on the Drawing of the Circle of Projection. Many thanks to the World Digital Library for raising our collective IQ. This is what I always knew the internet could be. -EMILY JACK

World Digital Library

Related stuff:

Visit the Library of Congress online

Access Primary Sources Online with the Perseus Digital Library

Check out ibiblio, the Online Library

Here’s a quick YouTube video that deals with amazing facts about the thing that our world revolved around — the sun. Learn about what causes sun spots, the northern lights, and solar winds. This NASA-produced video is a good introduction to a unit on the solar system. If your school blocks YouTube, just download it to your thumb drive in bring it with you to class. -BILL FERRIS

Secrets of a Dynamic Sun

Related stuff:

Make a Brilliant Noise

Peek into space with Windows on the Universe

Observe Mars in 3D