At Interactives at Learner.org, you will find interactive activities in the content areas of math, science, language arts, history, and the arts. Within each activity there is a combination of text, animations, pictures, and interactive material. I used this one on the rock cycle with my students last year.
BY BILL FERRIS
During the entire month of June, your students can access CarrotSticks
for free. As Jason reported in April, CarrotSticks normally only lets kids play addition mode for free. For the next few weeks elementary learners can also practice their subtraction, multiplication, geometric proofs, and division. It could be a fun way to promote some educational fun instead of TV.
BY BILL FERRIS
Energy use feels like an amorphous concept — unlike a fast-food transaction in which I know that five dollars gets me a third of a pound of artery-clogging goodness, it’s tough to visualize just how much leaving the living-room lights on all nights will cost me. General Electric has created a slick energy-awareness app that shows you how much each appliance costs you. Not just in terms of money, either. It shows kilowatt consumption, gasoline consumption, as well as showing how much use you can get out of a single kilowatt.
If you’re like me, you remember with fondness long nights with your friends, your trusty plastic icosahedron, pencils and paper, and junk food. I’m talking about Dungeons and Dragons of course, the game many of us geeks played when we were younger and had a lot more time on our hands. At one point blamed by pundits and media outlets as a bad influence on children, D&D is now making inroads in libraries and touting its value toward teaching children problem solving, teamwork, and mathematics and reading skills.
Back in my day, it was Math Blaster! for our classes’ Apple IIe, and I couldn’t get enough. But these days, client side games are so 2000s — everything is browser-based as internet connectivity becomes more universal. Such is the case with the free-to-play, internet-based CarrotSticks. It’s a pretty straightforward math game that rewards players for correctly answering mathematical questions of varying difficulties.
Let me just say it: I love PBS. From the documentaries, to the quality children’s programming, it’s one of my favorite channels to watch. But my love of Cookie Monster aside, did you know that PBS had developed a top-notch web resource for teachers? If the answer was no, then you owe it to yourself and your students to spend a planning period looking at the PBS Teachers website.
BY BILL FERRIS
NASA eClips presents lots of great videos that STEM teachers in any grade level will find useful. Through several examples of applied science and math, kids will get a sense of the cool stuff they can do by studying the sciences.
Want to see how NASA made Michael Phelps’ swim suit so fast? Wonder what astronauts do to stay in shape in space? How about checking out if anybody’s at home on Mars? NASA eClips explores these and lots of other areas, churning out new videos each week during the school year. (more…)
In light of the recent earthquake in Haiti, it seems appropriate to offer up tools for teaching about the possibilities of natural disasters and preparations that can be done locally in our schools which may better prepare students for coping with the situation should it occur. To that end, the Red Cross has assembled their Masters of Disaster curriculum focused for students K-8.
BY BILL FERRIS
It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.
Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.
BY BILL FERRIS
Welcome back from a long weekend. In this week’s by the numbers, we’ve got the answers to questions you’ll be asked in your next job interview, open-source ideas for educators, and some cool arithmetricks. Or, if you prefer, mathemagic. What’s that? You hate both of those puns? Fine, math tricks. Happy now?
Whatever you want to call them, you can read about them after the jump.
BY MELISSA THIBAULT
Picture this. You just finished teaching your third lesson on prime factors, photosynthesis or fractions, and there are some students who need more visuals and more practice. Wouldn’t it be great if you had free, quality-assured courseware in math, science, health, reading and keyboarding you could use to reinforce hard-to-grasp topics?
e-Learning for Kids, a global, nonprofit foundation, provides free courses for children ages 5 – 12, and is working to build a community for parents and educators to volunteer their expertise and share innovations and insights in childhood education. (more…)
BY BILL FERRIS
How far would your students go to save a lost pet? Would they infiltrate a nefarious underground factory that turns cuddly animals into food? Would they disguise themselves as monsters to outsmart gremlins, golems and yetis? Would they still go through all this rigmarole if they knew it was a way to practice their math skills?
Lure of the Labyrinth is an mathematics game from Maryland Public Television designed for middle-school pre-algebra students. The protagonist, a kid who’s just had his beloved pet abducted by Bigfoot and taken to a subterranean food mill, has to solve a series of math-based puzzles to get him back. The puzzles focus on proportions, ratios, fractions, and variables.
BY BILL FERRIS
Some kids love math. Some see it as a form of torture. Most are somewhere in between. If you’d like to reach out to students in the last two groups, consider using these five tools in class some time to help bridge the gap. I don’t teach math, but if I was still a student, these five would get me excited about math class.
BY BILL FERRIS
Check out these upcoming educational grants, as listed on Grant Wrangler.
Gladys Marinelli Coccia Awards — Deadline August 1
This award recognizes young (14 to 17-year-old) female social entrepreneurs who start enterprises for the common good. The winner receives $2,000 for the enterprise, travel, and access to social enterprise resources from Youth Service America.
If only Wolfram Mathworld had been around when I was banging my head against the wall trying to learn calculus, perhaps things would have been a lot easier. A predecessor of Wolfram Alpha, Mathworld lives up to its motto of being “The Web’s Most Extensive Mathematics Resource.” It’s a clearly thought out resource of mathematical terms, concepts, and visual references. Think of it like a math version of Wikipedia, but it’s not open to the public editing it. You can enter a concept in the search area, and it’s quite good at matching up the relevant information. Or you can use the left-side menu bar to navigate to your area of interest.
moxie design studios
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