Something that every science teacher needs.
This battery powered wand features a mini Van de Graaff generator inside. Push a button on the handle and the static charge built up in the wand causes the included 3D mylar shapes to levitate at your command. Pick it up from Think Geek.
An excellent tutorial video produced by Google for their suite of products. [via Free Technologies for Teachers]
HealthMap, dubbed as the ‘global disease alert map’, links news regarding disease outbreaks from around the world into a searchable Google Map interface. The service recently detected the salmonella outbreak in the U.S., which had sickened over 1,000 people, long before the Centre for Disease Control announced that it was happening.
HealthMap integrates outbreak data [...]
I do love the Google Earth product, as seen by at previous post where I share a method to help students visualize the vast size and distances that exist in our solar system. TechCrunch has written today about the increasing number of scientists who are using Google Earth to visualize their information. I find Google [...]
An editorial in The Star today by Lee Rimer is a great reminder that as we infuse our schools with computers and innovation we have to be mindful that what we are doing is adding value to the equation. The article critiques the online push of the University environment, with class notes, assignments and tests [...]
A post today by Brian at ‘Learning is Messy’ has engaged some of my over-arching thoughts on technology in education. I am a strong proponent of technology in the classroom, but I carry a mighty asterisk when I say that, because what I actually support is meaningful technology in the classroom. Brian correctly uses a [...]
I am a huge fan of Google Earth, and use it extensively for geotagging photos, as well as general exploring of the miraculous planet we call home. I have also had great success with using Google Earth in the classroom, and one of the short activities I like to do is plotting the relative distances [...]
Quantum mechanic and the idea of atomic orbitals can be a challenging topic for students to grasp after having been told their entire lives that electrons circle the nucleus of an atom like planets orbit the sun. In reality we can’t know where the electrons are precisely around the nucleus, but thanks to Quantum mechanics [...]
