BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Looking to harness your student’s creative energy and possible have them win a college scholarship at the same time? Google is once again staging their Doodle 4 Google competition, letting K-12 students across the country take a crack at redesigning the iconic Google logo. We’ve plugged this competition in the past, but it’s worthy of a re-mention. The theme for this year’s competition is “If I Could Do Anything, I Would …” All of the details about how to register your school and submit entries can be found here.

In addition to students winning prizes from scholarships to laptop computers, the ultimate grand-prize winner’s school (that’s right I said school) will receive a $25,000 grant toward a multimedia computer lab. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the winner’s artwork will be on display on the Google homepage for 24 hours. Talk about exposure!

Participants must register by March 17 and submit their entries by March 31. Time to get out the crayons and markers and produce some masterpieces.

Doodle 4 Google

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Get Your Schoodle to Doodle for Google

Get Your Schoodle to Doodle for Google, Part 2: The Votening

Ever wondered about the physics behind the slapshot? I haven’t. But after looking at Science of the Olympic Winter Games from NBC Sports and the National Science Foundation, I at least feel guilty about it.

The 2010 Winter Olympics begin February 12, and the SOWG site provides a timely look at the science surrounding Olympic events, and exciting new vocabulary words like “meltwater.” Find out the reasons behind design differences in ice skates, speed skates and hockey skates. Learn about the feats of aerial physics performed by skiers. And get a scientific explanation of curling, which covers everything from the brooms to what the heck the object of the game is.

Science of the Olympic Winter Games

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See physics and athletics combine on Sport Science

Build your own educational games at ProProfs BrainGames
ProProfs Brain Games lets you create simple online games for your class without expending much time or effort. The game varieties include crosswords, word finds, jigsaw puzzles, and so on. Not super-complex, but perfect for test reviews and elementary classrooms.

Find STEM resources at BioED Online
BioED is an online repository of lesson plans, teaching resources, full blown presentations and interactive contests for students. All the materials are aligned to academic standards, available for PDF download, and presentations are usually broken into components so if you wanted to use a slide or image from a presentation, they are available separately.

Actors read books to kids at Storyline Online
The Screen Actors Guild Foundation has produced Storyline Online, a streaming video site where SAG members read a wide selection of children’s books.

Misquoth Poe, nevermore: Poestories.com
You can find an excellent online repository of Edgar Allen Poe’s work at Poestories.com, which hosts many of his complete stories, poetry, and a link network to locate works not hosted.

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

I’ve been a big Edgar Allan Poe fan ever since he was an option for bedtime stories (before that it was Yeats or Lawrence, both highly effective at inducing sleep). Besides the well-known pieces Poe wrote, there are many works that are lesser-known but just as enjoyable. You can find an excellent online repository of his work at Poestories.com, which hosts many of his complete stories, poetry, and a link network to locate works not hosted.

A time line of Poe’s life and works nicely sets up a discussion of the effect that societal change and major historical events had on Poe’s writing (be advised the time line links to Wikipedia). There is also a gallery that has images from his life and the places he lived.

If there was one nitpick I have with the good folks at Poestories.com, it would be the color contrast choices for reading long pieces of text; some might find they need to cut and paste to a color arrangement more to their liking (or visible color spectrum).

Poestories.com

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Get to Know Poe

Lost Generation, Found

Fine and Dandy Collection

Get a Handle on Shakespeare with Shakespeare Online

One of the best moments of my day is reading a bedtime story to my boys. We get quality bonding time, they’re fostering what I hope is a life-long love of books, and I get to work on my list of character voices, which consists of “Gruff Adult Male,” “All-purpose Female,” “Little Kid,” and “Carnival Barker.” But little do they know that instead of putting up with Daddy’s lack of dramatic range, they could instead listen to James Earl Jones. The Screen Actors Guild Foundation has produced Storyline Online, a streaming video site where SAG members read a wide selection of children’s books.

Kids can follow along in their own books, or just watch the video, which includes the illustrations. You can toggle closed-captioning or, to make it even more book-like, turn off the sound, too, which kinda defeats the purpose of watching the videos, but it’s nice to know you could do this, I suppose.

You can find additional activities such as discussion questions and research prompts for each story. Storyline Online has a nice selection of narrators, too, including Al Gore and the aforementioned James Earl Jones, whose voice could make the phone book sound interesting. Storyline Online is a handy tool for a day when you’ve lost your voice (it is cold and flu season, after all). It’s also a nice place to steer kids toward for when they’re surfing the web at home. You never know whose parents have heard their dad’s carnival barker voice one too many times.

Storyline Online

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Take a peek at BookWink

Give beginning readers a head start with Starfall

The Caterpillar Exchange: using Eric Carle’s books in your classroom

Story time: Storynory

We had the LEARN NC staff retreat last week, and one of the subjects that received a good deal of discussion was efforts to promote STEM education resources. Seeing as we’re not scientists here at Instructify, the best way we can promote STEM is to shine our light on groups of scientists who are fighting the good fight. In that spirit, we direct your attention to BioED Online, offered by the good folks at Baylor University, is an online repository of lesson plans, teaching resources, full blown presentations and interactive contests for students.

All the materials are aligned to academic standards, available for PDF download, and presentations are usually broken into components so if you wanted to use a slide or image from a presentation, they are available separately. Of particular interest are the presentations on teaching strategies in science, which might be extremely useful for beginning teachers in the science field, as well as the laboratory techniques section for student instruction and review purposes. As always, this is 100 percent free, and even if it covers topics you know well, BioED might have multimedia components ready for use that might not be available to every school to produce on their own.

BioED Online

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Learn about penguins and the environment at Penguinscience

Punnett squares made easy with The Biology Project tutorial

Dragon DNA and other genetics fun: Genetics Web Lab Directory

Avoid sticky situations with the Virtual Drosophila Lab

Online Stopwatch keeps your running class on time

This periodic table includes elements and their real-world applications

Explaining new technologies, 7 Things at a time

Map word relationships at Lexipedia

Make better animated movies with Xtranormal State

Educational videos, organized, at WatchKnow

FreePoverty donates drinking water based on your geography knowledge

Free lesson planning from the Red Cross for disaster preparation

See, hear historic congressional moments with the Oral History of the U.S. House of Representatives

Learn about free speech in books in Libraries and the First Amendment

ProProfs Brain Games lets you create simple online games for your class without expending much time or effort. The game varieties include crosswords, word finds, jigsaw puzzles, and so on. Not super-complex, but perfect for test reviews and elementary classrooms.

ProProfs does the hard work of configuring the puzzles themselves, meaning you just have to come up with questions and answers. So if you’ve got a bunch of vocabulary words you want your students to learn, consider putting them in a crossword format to make the exercise a little more entertaining. Instead of a pop quiz, maybe create a series of Brain Teasers. These games are easy ways to make standard classroom procedure a little more interactive (and a little less work).

ProProfs Brain Games

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Talk about gaming and learning in the Learning Games Network Teacher PLC

Trivia games abound at Sporcle

Build your own board games with The Game Crafter

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.

Latest images

Yellow River Delta, 1989 and 2009

Water Use On Idaho’s Snake River Plain

Tsauchab River and Sossus Vlei Lakebed, Namibia

Avignon, France

2009 Ends Warmest Decade on Record

Storms in California

Flooding in Tanzania

Ice on the St Lawrence River, Canada

NASA news

NASA Climatologist Gavin Schmidt Discusses the Surface Temperature Record

NASA Research Finds Last Decade was Warmest on Record, 2009 One of Warmest Years

JPL Scientist Receives American Meteorological Society Honor

Is Antarctica Melting?

NASA Information on Haiti

GOES-P Spacecraft Being Processed in Florida

Study Links Spring Ozone With Emissions Abroad

Headlines from the press, radio, and television

Warming Speeds up Gas Emissions

Sea Ice Cracks Up

Haiti Earthquake Science: What Caused the Disaster

The Story Behind Earth’s Coldest Temperature Ever

A Howling, Bulked-Up El Nino

Century-Old Antarctic Station Shows Warming

Scrutinizing Swamp Gas: Model Helps Predict Global Wetland Greenhouse Emissions

Unusual Arctic Warmth as North Hemisphere Shivers

Past Decade Warmest on Record, NASA Data Shows

Warming Expected to Cut Atlantic Hurricane Tally but Boost Threat

America ‘Imports’ Pollution from Asia

Mexican Megacrystals Formed by Climate Back-and-Forth

Caribbean at Risk of more Large Earthquakes

Major Antarctic Glacier is ‘Past its Tipping Point’

Mammals “Rafted” to Madagascar, Climate model Suggests

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Primary resources are the most important historical tool that students, teachers, and scholars have to examine the past. As someone who holds a degree in history and holds history near to his heart, the compacting and summarizing of society-changing documents into a single paragraph in a text book brings a tear to my eye. More and more, historical documentation is referenced for justification by those who have not read what was actually written.

Enter the website, Our Documents, a completely free-to-use, wonderfully cataloged and explained collection of 100 milestone documents in American history. Documents are provided in both their original format with high-resolution images as well as full transcriptions — script from the 1700’s is very hard to read. It’s one thing to note that in George Washington’s farewell address he advocated avoiding long-term alliances and warned of political partisanship. However, when you read the actual document and see the passion and reasoning laid out, it makes the moment stand out in a student’s mind and can provoke engaging discussion in the classroom.

I could go on for many paragraphs about why the study of primary sources is paramount to an understanding of historical events in their proper context, but let me just say this is an extremely important and useful free resource for an academic field that sorely needs it. For teachers, there is a Teacher Sourcebook (FYI, this is a 4MB PDF, so you might be better off right-clicking that link and hitting “save target as” or “save link as” rather than having it load each time) that help teachers generate lesson plans and activities for each of the documents. Some of these documents can be of an overwhelming length or a writing style containing vocabulary unfamiliar in our modern English lexicon, so the accompanying Sourcebook is an invaluable tool to helping students adjust to learning through these primary sources.

These are the documents that form the basis of American society; they deserve examination by students in any history or government course.

Our Documents

Related stuff:

U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian

Awesome Stories: Connecting primary sources from around the web

Break into the vaults at the National Archive Experience

Put your hands together for The Civil Rights Digital Library

Living Galapagos explores balance between man and nature
In order to document and present the challenges the Galapagos islands face, a website call Living Galapagos has been created with a wealth of information about these islands’ current situation.

Talk about gaming and learning in the Learning Games Network Teacher PLC
Are you passionate about gaming as a valid form of education? You’re not alone. The Learning Games Network wants to put you in touch with other like-minded educators through their Teachers Professional Learning Community.

Win education travel fellowships from EarthWatch
EarthWatch has created fellowships for students, teachers, conservation professionals, and corporate employees to participate in research expeditions worldwide.

Net Cetera: A handy cybersafety booklet from the FTC
I don’t know what I did to get on the Federal Trade Commission’s radar, but I’ve gotten a bunch of email from them lately. So far, it’s all been good — the first email was for YouAreHere, a cool site that tells kids how to be savvy consumers. Now they’ve sent me Net Cetera, a handy guide for good online citizenship.

I don’t know what I did to get on the Federal Trade Commission’s radar, but I’ve gotten a bunch of email from them lately. So far, it’s all been good — the first email was for YouAreHere, a cool site that tells kids how to be savvy consumers. Now they’ve sent me Net Cetera, a handy guide for good online citizenship.

Net Cetera deals with the benefits and hazards of P2P file sharing, privacy issues, identity theft, phishing, spamming, cyberbullying, sexting, and other cleverly named vices unique to the internet. It also talks about getting parents involved in their kids’ internet usage. You can download Net Cetera for free as a handy PDF, which is also available in Spanish. If you’d like to distribute these to your class, you can also bulk order free copies from the FTC.

As technology becomes more integrated with life and school, knowing how to stay safe online is a vital skill. It’ll help me stay on my best behavior, now that I know the FTC is watching me.

Net Cetera

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YouAreHere teaches kids to be smart consumers

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Teach students Internet safety with iKeepSafe.org

BY DAVID BARGER

As Mark Twain famously remarked, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” In today’s world of war and unrest, it is not hard to see that we all could use a little less of these things in our lives. Given the current economic climate, though, overseas travel is probably not making the cut in most family budgets. Although our wallets might be getting smaller, the world is not. It’s as big and wonderful as it has always been.

So how do we get out there and enjoy it? The folks at the EarthWatch Institute have a good idea. They have created fellowships for students, teachers, conservation professionals, and corporate employees to participate in research expeditions worldwide.

Travel Fellows are emissaries of the EarthWatch mission, and are asked to share what they have learned on their adventures with other students, teachers, and colleagues upon their return. Obviously everyone can’t win a fellowship, though. For the rest of us, EarthWatch has a list of adventure-inspired lesson plans and curriculum ideas on the site.

Be sure to check with EarthWatch to see what fellowship opportunities are available, as well as many other helpful classroom activities that help keep our world just a bit more accessible for all of us. But act fast — the deadline for summer expeditions is February 28!

Safe travels!

EarthWatch

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Go on a scientific expedition to the south pole with PolarTREC

Girls on Ice sends female students on a free mountaineering expedition

Are you passionate about gaming as a valid form of education? You’re not alone. The Learning Games Network wants to put you in touch with other like-minded educators through their Teachers Professional Learning Community:

“The PLC will provide a forum for teachers to share experiences and ideas for using existing games in the classroom, as well as discuss ideas and concepts for where games could fill gaps and niches in curricula. Teachers involved in technology will also have the opportunity for professional development in workshops with developers and producers. And ultimately, we hope that the Teacher PLC will provide mentors and ‘chapter advisors’ for local and regional groups of students in the Design Corps.”

If you’re interested, fill out their questionnaire. A lot of folks feel like gaming could be the next educational revolution. Here’s your chance to talk with them and make it happen.

Learning Games Network Teachers Professional Learning Community

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Photo credit: Sabino . on Flickr.

Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origins of Species 150 years ago, the Galapagos Islands have always been of particular interests to scientist and environmentalist alike. Back then the diversity of species as they evolved in relative isolation formed some of the basis of Darwin’s ground-breaking and controversial scientific hypothesis.

Fast forward a century and a half and a new debate surrounds the famous archipelago and its renowned environmental treasure. Like the rest of the planet, the Galapagos is trying to deal with an ever increasing human population in relationship to a finite amount of resources locally available; it’s a delicate balancing act in an area with a fragile ecosystem.

In order to document and present the challenges the islands face, a website call Living Galapagos has been created with a wealth of information about the current situation in the Galapagos. As a web developer I can say this is one of the more polished projects I have seen on the internet. With rich multimedia content, the site conveys a great feel for what the current situation is in the Galapagos and how things continue to change with the increasing human presence. The problems laid out, including immigration and invasive species, are complex and without easy solutions.

Within the classroom this site could be the starting point for discussion on several subjects ranging from environmental impact analysis to basic biology concepts to social movements for conservation. The ease of navigation and clear presentation makes it readily accessible to both younger and more advanced students. The site can also flawlessly switch between English and Spanish so there are great opportunities to work the content into foreign-language curricula as well.

Living Galapagos

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Conservation-minded virtual field trips at Field Trip Earth

Check out these Biodiversity Hotspots