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….. Read the entire article here.
From Teachers Love SMART Boards Blog
by James Hollis
I found a fabulous interactive website that lets students explore our solar system to get a much clearer understanding about planet orbits, size, and relative position to one another.
The site is simply calledPlanets and it’s a fantastic resource for the SMART Board interactive whiteboard.
The site allows the teacher or student to control how they are viewing the solar system. Users can touch and drag to move things around and they have a complete set of controls to change scale, speed of orbits (passing of time), or planetary object to follow. For example, if you follow the Sun, the Sun is stationary and it shows the other planets orbiting the Sun. If you follow the Earth, then it shows the other planetary objects with a stationary Earth.
For you Pluto lovers, this resource shows Pluto as being the farthest “planet” away from the Sun. :o)
I hope you enjoy this incredible resource for the SMART Board. Please share it with your fellow teachers.
Sharing Is Caring!
This site offers a growing bank of imaginative, highly visual teaching-aids developed for use with interactive whiteboards in 11-18 Schools.
From Free Technology for Teachers
Once again, Open Culture has discovered a real gem for education. Khan Academy has a YouTube Channel on which they have posted hundreds of mathematics and science tutorial videos. The videos range in length from five minutes to 20+ minutes. The videos that I previewed had clear spoken commentary as well as clear visual aids….. Read the rest of the article at Free Technology for Teachers
You can use several tools to download and convert the You Tube videos for use in the classroom.
What it is: The Carbon Cycle Game is a free online game that teaches students about how carbon cycles through the Earth system. It is appropriate for 4th-9th grade students learning about the carbon cycle. As students play the game, they will learn that carbon cycles naturally through living and non-living parts of the Earth system in a complex, non-linear way, that burning fossil fuels adds carbon to the cycle, the impact of additional carbon dioxide on global warming, and that carbon is essential for living things. Students will travel around the game as a little carbon atom. They will stop at key places on the game board and get a pop-up of information about the carbon cycle. At any point students can click on key words in the pop-up and will be directed to a page with additional information. Students will also land on question marks that pop-up questions testing students about what they have learned so far. When students answer questions correctly they earn game points.
How to integrate The Carbon Cycle Game into the classroom: The Carbon Cycle Game would be best…..read the rest of the article here.
Nine Planets.org is a large collection information and images designed to be used as a virtual tour of the solar system. The information on Nine Planets.org is organized by planet working progressively away from the sun. Nine Planets.org also provides information and images on smaller bodies in the solar system.Applications for Education
Nine Planets advertises itself as a virtual tour, it’s not the type of tour that will instantly engage students. Nine Planets is best used as a reference resource as the content itself is excellent although the layout is not great. Teachers should find the lesson plan links quite useful.
If you’re looking for more space science resources take a look at Celestia, SkyServer, and Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope.
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Scifun.org, written by a University of Wisconsin chemistry professor, features twenty-five fun and safe science experiments that can be performed with household items. The experiments introduce students to basic chemistry concepts through fun, hands-on activity.Applications for Education
The experiments on Science is Fun are probably most appropriate for use with students in the fourth through ninth grade. In addition to providing detailed directions for conducting each experiment, Science is Fun provides an explanation of the chemistry at work in each experiment. Complementing the experiments are easy-to-understand explanations of many chemicals and elements on the periodic table.
Sparktop.org and Garfield creator Jim Davis have lent their creative spirits to help kids enjoy an interactive website called Professor Garfield. That’s right, everyone’s favorite fat cat is helping to educate young ones in a variety of subject areas like math, language, arts, science and more. Through a plethora of high-energy interactive flash games, students can have fun while not even realizing that they are learning. The games and activities are slick, fun, and downright hilarious. I had a great time exploring the many aspects of the site, and I have been out of school for hundreds of years.
My personal favorite is a reading game called Reading Ring where you’re required to place the panels of a Garfield comic strip in order, and then answer questions about the strip in order to defeat your opponent in a wrestling match. For every 3 questions you get right, you win a round. The whole thing is framed by cartoony wrestling antics and sounds. In fact, the whole site is a little noisy, but luckily, there’s a “quiet mode” which allows you to turn off most of the sounds. Professor Garfield is a child of Sparktop.org, another site that gives students options for being creative on the web while learning their little hearts out. Between the two sites, your students will have plenty to do when they need something to keep them busy on the web. And if you’re a Garfield fan like me, you might enjoy spending time here as well. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN
Hunkin’s Experiments – Cool Cartoon Experiments for Your Classroom
Good News! Read the article here. 