Discovery News: Earth, Space, Tech, Animals, Dinosaurs, History.

Read all about it. This is a great channel from the Discovery Channel bringing news about science, technology & human history. There’s great reading here and food for thought that can spark real interest, discussion and more learning.  Beats includes space, archeology, humans, earth, history, technology & animals, including dinosaurs.

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin is a new documentary airing tonight on PBS [Channel 13 in NYC]. Part of the build-up around this video includes nominating and voting for an artist who’s had a great impact on history.

Musical artists that is, and it seems that we are leaving out the likes of Mozart, Vivaldi, Wagner, Bach, Beethoven & Brahms.

“On November 9th, WNET.ORG will air a special one-hour documentary about The Beatles to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin tells the extraordinary and untold story of how the Beatles punctured the Iron Curtain. In a personal journey through Russia by award-winning director Leslie Woodhead, he tells in first-person accounts the story of a secret revolution which contributed to the fall of communism.” Read more.

I nominated Pete Seeger, and must admit I was shocked to find my name and nomination on the Voting Page. The Beatles are certainly the favorites to win the voting. Cast your vote now! You could win The Beatles 17-Disk Remastered Box Set. Voting ends today just before midnight.

AMERICAN MASTERS: JOAN BAEZ: HOW SWEET THE SOUND Thirteen.org’s EdOnline is still highlighting Joan Baez which premiered on television in October. For learning about the 1960’s, there are some excellent resources here. Lessons plans, that tie-in with the Joan Baez video include:
The 1960s: Youthful Optimism, Activism, and Joan Baez
Vietnam Passage Journeys from War to Peace

Stumbling around the Internet earlier this year I came upon a class blog, Write Out Loud, where students discussed what they learned about this tumultuous decade in a 7th grade English Class. It’s truly interesting reading the comments from today’s students. Being a teenager in school at that time, it’s humbling and fascinating to look back and realize that you, too, have an historic voice, small though it might be. Through the technological miracles of the, television,  and a free press, you were there. Some of my friends who are a bit older were videotaped; and my mother actually attended SUNY Stony Brook NY which also erupted in violence.

Just for Fun

Lost Tapes : Creaturefy Yourself, Lost Tapes Game : Animal Planet.

From Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet, this flash app lets you upload a photo and transform yourself into a ghoulish creature using eyes, hair, noses, teeth and more from the Vampire, Lizardman, Werewolf, Owlman and Bigfoot creature.

This is me, part Lizardmand and Owlman.

Melinda Galbraith at NECC 2009

I met Melinda Galbraith at 2009 NECC presenting information about iEARN and their global initiatives for student interaction and professional development. There are wonderful opportunities for international collaboration and building multicultural understandings through various disciplines. They have several active projects.This is from their most recent email update.

iEARN – International Education and Resource Network.

It’s also an easy-to-use Java applet. Go to wordle.net to try it out. Click on the CREATE link and you’ll find a page where you can type in, or paste in, any text. You can also type in the URL (web address) of another page or a del.icio.us user name to see their tags as a Wordle. In this example I used the text from the Why Wordle blog post. Two important tips were mentioned in the presentation on the blog post. First, you can delete individual words in the Wordle by right clicking on a word and click on ‘delete xxx’ from the little menu. [PC Users]. Secondly, use ~ to connect two or more words together to be used as one term. If you want to enlarge the size of a particular word, just type in several more times. The more often a word is used, the larger it is.

Saving your Wordle can be a bit tricky. You can save it to the Wordle gallery by clicking the button on the page, and link to the URL  – that’s the easiest thing to do. You can also print it right from your computer.  If you have a PDF creater installed on your computer you can save it as a PDF using the Print Function.

Or,  you can do a screen capture to save it to your computer. The FAQ’s refer users to this site , which is pretty good, for more information about how to do that. Basically, you press the PRT SC [Print Screen] key on your computer. In my case I also have to use the FN [Function] key as that button is shared with the Insert key. The image is saved into short-term memory, and you have to paste it into another picture editing software application and save it from there. Your image is lost, replaced by a new image when you use the Print Screen key again, or turn off your computer.

This can be a great way to inspire, or perhaps provide a lesson’s opening discussion or motivation.

• Managed, protected environment with easy password protection
• Easily add Multimedia features including videos, photos and more
• FREE ..  and includes 40 student accounts for teachers. You  can buy more, too, in packs of 10 for $10, and you can upgrade to a Pro account for $39.95/year
• NO Advertising!

Weebly provides over 70 templates with the added flexibility to completely customize your own, and it’s all hosted for free by Weebly. You can also use your own domain name at no extra charge.

You can create blogs at Weebly, too. However, I couldn’t find a way to import or export posts, which means I’ll keep using other blogging engines that do, such as this one which using WordPress.

By the way, tomorrow “Using Weebly to Design Classroom Websites” with special guest Dan Veltri will be the Classroom 2.0 webinar session. Details are at http://live.classroom20.com. If you miss it, check out the archives  at http://live.classroom20.com. Click on the “Archive and Resources” page to view the past recordings.

Weebly – For Educators

Weebly – Free Website and Blog for Everyone

The interactive activity, Energy Consumption has links to worksheets, explains BTU’s and students calculate and compare costs of using different fuels and insulation to heat and cool a home in San Francisco, Dallas and Minnesota. There are many activities linked to this interactive.

Future Power includes a virtual lab. Links to videos and articles are embedded in the activity. Students compare the costs and CO2 emissions of natural gas and coal mixtures. Unfortunately the lab doesn’t include other fuel options, but perhaps students can investigate those as well. It is still  a very useful activity and challenges students to plan, experiment and report their findings.

How to Light Up a Room is another virtual lab that studies the effect of different window coverings on temperature. Students can run the experiments, compare and chart data.

Power Up is a fairly simple interactive activity where students complete a pie chart that identifies how much electrical energy is provided by different fuel sources in the US. Written information is provided for each source (grades 5 +). Mineral Resources – Recycling Aluminum is a one-session interactive good for lower grades.

Overall this is an exceptional collection of resources that can used to enrich learning in science and other disciplines.

Sept 14, 2009: The Washington Post Blog: The Answer Sheet – Willingham: Student “Learning Styles” Theory Is Bunk.

Learning styles gets a lot of attention in current teacher education. Daniel Willingham, guest blogger. cognitive scientiest and author of Why Students Don’t Like School, “It doesn’t work–not only for the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory, but for many other learning styles theories that have been proposed and tested since the 1940s.”  He goes on to state that, “Suggesting that teachers cater to learning styles—when teachers must already do some differentiation based on what students know—makes a teacher’s job much more difficult with no benefit to students.”

But the bottom line seems to be that categorizing students within the framework of auditory, visual and kinesthetic is meaningless. I would comment, however, that varying delivery methods can make for a more engaging classes. Learning often involves repeated exposure and actual use of information; doing that in different ways is certainly more interesting than doing it the same way all the time.