BY BILL FERRIS

Do you enjoy playing video games, learning geography, and helping those less fortunate, not necessarily in that order? The online game FreePoverty rewards your knowledge of geography by donating 10 cups of water to thirsty people around the world for every city or landmark you can correctly place on a world map.

Similar to FreeRice, FreePoverty lets you have fun and help others at the same time. (more…)

If free sounds good to you, then you need to check out one of the North Carolina Ag in the Classroom workshops being offered this July at the Sheraton Imperial in Durham, North Carolina.  There are two sessions open to North Carolina teachers: “Ag in the Classroom Reading and Science Workshop for Grade K-5 Teachers,” and ‘Farmer Grows a Rainbow: Nutrition Education Workshop for K-12.” The three-day sessions are packed with lesson ideas, teaching strategies and even field trips to local farms and agribusinesses.

North Carolina Farm Bureau sponsors the North Carolina Ag in the Classroom educational program.  This long running program has helped students and teachers across the state learn more about the role agriculture plays in North Carolina’s economy. Each summer the North Carolina Farm Bureau hosts free workshops for teachers that include materials, lodging and meals.

During both summer workshops participants will receive lesson plans, materials and research-based strategies to help them create agriculturally themed, hands-on activities that target literacy and science education.  Upon completion participants will receive two continuing education credits.

Even in this age of technology, agriculture still plays a vital role in North Carolina’s economy. The North Carolina Ag in the Classroom workshops help teachers and students develop an appreciation for the role the farmer plays in getting food to their table.

If you’re interested in one of these free workshops there is no time to waste!  Space is limited.  Acceptance notices will be mailed to participants on May 1, 2009.   Your application must be submitted prior to that date. -CINDY PHTHISIC

Ag in the Classroom summer workshops

North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services educational resources

United States Department of Agriculture Ag in the Classroom site

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Nom nom nom: The Edible Schoolyard

Photo credit: Eduardo Amorim on Flickr.

25 Item To-Do List Everyone Should be Doing - If you’re not already making to-do lists in order to be the most productive you can be, maybe now is the time to start. This list from BANDBMAMA’s Blog is a great place to start. Such helpful items as taking a walk to smiling at others can really make your day feel great and productive.

9 Things Every New Blogger Should Know -Blogging doesn’t have to be difficult. If you and your class aren’t blogging already, don’t get overwhelmed before you even start. There are a few things you should know before you get started, however. This list is a good place to start, as it illustrates a few of the crucial things to producing a blog that’s approachable and engaging. Check out these tips and more from Blogging Agenda.

10 Ways to Eat Natural - I’ve been doing my best to start eating more healthily lately. I’ve stopped eating fried foods and cut down on other processed items, and I’m honestly feeling a lot better already. Eating healthy and natural doesn’t mean you have to completely restructure your diet, however. If you abide by a few of these tips from Health.com, you’ll find that eating natural foods might be easier than you think.

10 Most Popular DIY Sites -  Do you like to get your hands dirty and create from scratch? Does the look and feel of something that you’ve made all by yourself give you a thrill? Do you simply just like to make things with your own hands? Well, there are plenty of resources on the web for you to find ways of doing-it-yourself when it comes to making projects with things at your disposal. This list of the 10 best resources might even lend you a great opportunity to do some fun projects with your students. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: Arbron on Flickr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkley California has an initiative known as The Edible Schoolyard. It’s a non-profit organization developed in order to find ways of cooking and gardening for young people in their everyday lives. Chef and author Alice Waters conceived the program with Principal Neil Smith and has been underway since 1997. In the school, students in the Garden Program see for the care and preparation of organic foods from “seed to table.”

This is the type of initiative that teaches students at an early age where food comes from, and what exactly it takes for their favorite meals to make their way to the table. Students plant seeds, tend crops, and harvest various organic produce, and then go on to prepare their harvest in the kitchen. Students are also encouraged to break into small groups, where they learn the value of working together in order to see their work come to life, as well as keep track of their progress in garden journals. This is a great way for students to learn about ecological principles as well as how nature is an important element in their daily lives. There is plenty of information available at The Edible Schoolyard website, where you can also learn about ways to help support the initiative, as well as tips and suggestions of ways you can begin a similar initiative in your own school. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

The Edible Schoolyard

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I just ate the sticker off my granny smith apple.  Well, to be more precise, I just ate about 3/4 of the sticker, and when I was taking the next bite, I saw the remaining bit.  So I didn’t eat the whole sticker.  But now I am left wondering which is more toxic — the pesticides no doubt used to make sure this delicious apple grew to be ginormous, or the sticker and its adhesive?  I mean, they have to consider that one in 10 dummies will end up eating the sticker, right?

Michael Pollan wrote a tremendous pieces for the NYT Magazine this weekend: An Open Letter to Our Next Farmer-in-Chief.  In it, he argues that the American food system is deeply broken, and with the price of oil rising, in need of reform. Soon.

It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

The piece lays out an agenda that includes not just reform of the government’s approach to agriculture (which should delight free-marketeers), but a prescription for better health (cutting back on plentiful corn and soy could mean limitations on cheap non-food derivatives like high fructose corn syrup) and some re-tooling of the educational system as well (taking a long hard look at agricultural/industrial education and how we promote certain careers).  This is the kind of thoughtful editorial that could spark some real discussion in a classroom — you could use it as-is for high-schoolers or adapt it for middle-schoolers. -ROSS WHITE

An Open Letter to Our Next Farmer-in-Chief

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Photo credit: Stevie Rocco on flickr

Five Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations -Michael Hyatt’s blog, Working Smart, has these 5 great tips to spice up your next PowerPoint. The article is written from a business perspective, but that doesn’t mean these tips won’t help you when teaching the Civil War or Beowulf. One of the more important tidbits of advice is #4: Less is More. Amen, Mr. Hyatt.

40 Places for College Students to Find Free Unabridged Books Online -Your students, whether they are going to college or not, can surely benefit from more reading. In a digital age, why waste all the paper it takes to reprint a book when they are often archived online. These resources are, of course, free and include a list of places you can download audio versions of your favorite classics. Thanks to Education-Portal.com

Eleven Worst Foods Americans Eat Daily - It might be high time to get back on a health kick for your author, and what better place to start than identifying and limiting or eliminating certain foods from my diet. You can get on the train with me, and start the school year off right. HealthAssist.net presents this list of 11 kinds of food you should think twice before eating. Unfortunately for you, me and the good people at Krispy Kreme, doughnuts lead the list. Bummer, Bear Claw.

(25) Funny Metaphors Used in High School Essays -Because we aren’t without a sense of humor around here, (hopefully, you have one, too) so here are Help.com’s 25 examples of ridiculous metaphors used by high school students in various essays. Please note: some of these might be considered similes.  Among my favorite: From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30 and He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

12 Superfoods You Need to be Eating - If there’s anyone who loves to eat, it’s me. Unfortunately, I don’t always pay too much attention to what I am putting in my body. Lucky for me, and everyone else out there who trying to get beach ready, StartCooking.com offers this list of some of the foods you might already be eating, and some that you should start. Thankfully on the list: peanut butter. Nom.

60 Selected Best Famous Quotes - “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”—Wayne Gretzky. For this and other gems of wisdom, point your browser over to Litemind to discover some highly thought provoking quotes just in time for dinner party season. Or, I guess you can dole some out in your classroom to help you students realize how well-read you are. I’m thinking this is where I’ll go when I need something to open my first novel.

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library - I never thought I would include a blog called The Art of Manliness on a education blog, but here I am. This list isn’t exclusively for men, of course, but it does offer some great reads for those of us who don’t fancy Little Women. Maybe this list can inspire some of your guy students to want to read this summer. Not surprisingly included on the list, A Catcher in the Rye.

15 Ways to Teach Kids About Money - Most of us are pinching pennies right now, but that doesn’t mean our youngsters know what the words “recession,” “inflation,” or “insufficient funds” mean. Right now might be the best time to teach them though, according to this list from Family Education:

Help children learn the differences between needs, wants, and wishes. This will prepare them for making good spending decisions in the future.

Those are words we can probably all benefit from. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

How to Save Money on Gas - 29 Tips – I now own a car for the first time in ages. In fact, the last time I had to fill up a tank it barely cost me a nickel. And back then there were only 14 cars, period. Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but gas is seriously expensive right now. Here’s a great list from OpenTravelInfo.com, where they explore some easy and great ways to cut down on the amount of nickels you pour down your tank.

18 Five-Minute Decluttering Tips to Start Conquering Your Mess – Let me guess, you “know where everything is,” right? Even so, it doesn’t make your work any easier. Who wants to come home from a cluttered desk to a cluttered desk? Zen Habits presents these 18 tips on where to begin.

8 Ways to be Ruthless With Your Time – Who knew that actually planning your day would save you time? Not me, I guess. Thanks to Lifehack, now I know that scheduling things before I do them can help me save some minutes. Read more about it and seven other tips here.

29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet – If Superman was a real dude, I imagine his menu might look a little something like this. This list via BellyBites.com boasts such delicious and nutritious foods such as Apricots, Bok Choy and Crab. (Not a suggested combination of ingredients, however.) –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: incurable_hippie on flickr.

From the comfort of our living rooms, we can build make-believe cities, play lead guitar in a rock and roll band, and dance like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. As computer games continue to dominate our students’ leisure time, educators are asking how to incorporate this popular technology in the classroom.

As educators, one hurdle we face is how to keep students’ attention while teaching important lessons. Now, thanks to the folks at the United Nations World Food Programme, we have an opportunity to enlighten students to the problems and concerns of world hunger by integrating the fun of computer games into a learning environment.

Food Force is a downloadable computer action game aimed at 8-13 year olds. The game consists of six missions that allow students to see and make a situational assessment of a hunger crisis in a fictional country. Each subsequent mission builds on skills learned and allows students to make valuable decisions about food distribution and logistics. And teachers, don’t miss the links page where you can find numerous sites providing research and background on the global hunger crisis.

Given the persistent problem of world hunger, Food Force is an entertaining way to teach younger students of this treatable epidemic. With this exciting and inventive site, we have the chance to allow students to turn virtual problems into real solutions that can alter our reality for the better. —DAVID BARGER

Food Force

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Test Your Vocabulary and Feed the Hungry with FreeRice

Vocabulate so others might masticate. Or something. Play FreeRice, a fun online vocabulary game, where a healthy vocabulary means healthy food donated to starving people. For every word you define correctly, the United Nations World Food Program will donate 10 grains of rice. If you’re a bookish person, you can easily accumulate a Chinese take-out container’s worth of rice in a couple minutes.

FreeRice is designed to be fun for all vocabulary levels, and adjusts depending on which words you get right and wrong, so don’t be afraid if you don’t know what “coarctation” means (it means narrowing, apparently). According to the site, there are 50 levels in all, though folks rarely get past level 48.

FYI, there are small logos from sponsors on the page, but they aren’t intrusive, and since they’re footing the bill for the rice, you probably won’t mind.

You’ll definitely want to send your English students here before their next vocabulary test or during SAT season. Got the hankering for a master’s degree? GRE words abound on FreeRice. And since it’s for a good cause, you won’t feel guilty for spending your entire planning period trying to raise your level. –BILL FERRIS

FreeRice

The best meals are the ones you make yourself. Blogger and dietician Clever Dudette extols the virtues of bringing your own meals to work in her post, Frugal Lunch. It’s healthy, and you can save big bucks. Her calculated savings of $988 per year are probably a bit inflated, since she bases it on spending $6 per lunch five days a week (though if you are spending $6 on fast food every noon, you should definitely start bring your own lunch and invest the savings in a treadmill).

The post also lists several inexpensive meal ideas that sound a lot tastier than the ham and cheese on white I made today. The comments section has great ideas, too, like making larger dinner portions and brining the leftovers the next day. There’s nothing groundbreaking here–most of the suggestions are rooted in common sense. That said, if you work at a school, you probably know sense isn’t all that common.

The unspoken benefit in all this is, of course, eating something a little tastier and healthier than the fare at the school cafeteria. Now, I don’t want to disparage your school’s hard-working food service staff. They’ve got the impossible task of trying to make food for hundreds of different appetites, many of whom spend their time in the lunch line complaining. So think of this as doing them a favor by lightening their workload.–BILL FERRIS

Frugal Lunch