Archive for the 'education' Category
how it all ends
art meets science
Nice – a full periodic table produced by 96 different printmakers, the elements rendered in every combination of woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, and collage. This one’s Tungsten (aka wolfram). Unfortunately they don’t all have that much scientific info attached to the images, but you can always get that here.
via Bionic Teaching
The Visible Body
The Visible Body is a free virtual human anatomy website with detailed models of all human body systems. It requires an app to be installed to render the 3D views but it’s pretty awesome – this is a female skeleton showing urinary, respiratory and endocrine systems.
via thetumbldish
Warriors of The Net
This video’s been around for ages but it was always a favourite of mine, and though it’s a bit cheesey and out of date now (anyone for the Ping of Death?) it had a lasting impact on the way I understand the net – it’s still basically the way I visualise “packets” and “headers” :)
from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod
When I first saw it I was still based at Lime Grove (it was released in 1999 to help up-skill telecomm engineers) and the idea of using a web-clip that was more than 70MB long in the classroom was ludicrous: how times have changed.
more info on the film – http://www.mundi.net/maps/maps_024/
sesame street goes web2.0
I think the voices would drive me nuts after not a very long time – but hey ho, it’s not aimed at me. It’s an immersive, multi-lingual, 2D multi-user virtual environment for kids, no less, (or an IMLMUVEFK as we say in the business).
Google have put up a resource page here, to help teachers use their tools (Search, Maps, Earth, Images and News). It’s got lesson plans, classroom ideas and links to other Google sponsored projects such as digitalexplorer and the Google UK Carbon Footprint Project (or GUKCFP as we call it :). It’s aimed at Secondary Educators but there’s some nice stuff there and some pretty innovative links – the CarbonGame for instance is a live – pan european simulation, where European schools compete against each other in a carbon trading game.
via OUseful Info
students 2.0
Can’t say it looks *that* International to me: 6 from the US and one each from Scotland and Korea – and I’m not that sure I think of students as being particularly “silent” – and surely I’ve seen some population figures that question the majority bit – and the music was a bit luke warm and…. but I shouldn’t be churlish. I know I’m going to stick it in my reader come Monday: good luck to ‘em.
The Edublog 2007 awards (otherwise known as the “Eddies”) have announced this years finalists, so if you’re wondering where to start when it comes to reading your peers the finalist list isn’t a bad place to look: there are some fantastically engaged, and engaging, writers there.
There are tons of translation services out there but Lingro, I think, is a little slice of genius. You paste a url into it’s search bar – as below:
It then opens the page with all the text (including the hyperlinks) clickable for translation – so if there’s a word you don’t recognise – click on it and you get a pop-up (quickly too) with a translation into the language you’ve chosen, and an audio snippet of the word in it’s native tongue. This is what it looks like:
The little slice of genius comes because it remembers what words you’ve clicked on – so as you work through a document/page it’s automatically building a wordlist of the words you didn’t know. You can review them in that browser session without having to sign up – and you can sign up in 20 secs without even giving an email address. Once you’ve signed up you can save your wordlists – organise them into groups and test yourself with a flash-card game. You get a quick flash of the full definitions – then you can test yourself with cards that flip between word and definition.
It’s only available for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Polish at the moment (though they are adding languages) and it was a bit wobbly on a couple of sites I tried it with (mainly because they had a very cluttered structure), but all in all I’d say it’s just about a perfect Web2.0 service – light-touch, does one thing well, doesn’t make you jump through hoops: and you can upload txt, docs or pdf’s to it if you want help with something not on the web. Bravo Lingro!
the web is becoming automatic
One of the things about putting an output (rss) on your web-presence is that people can do helpful/interesting/surprising things with it. This is a trivial example, but Andy Powell at Eduserve wanted to make an easy way to subscribe to all the blogs nominated for the Edublog awards. A few technical glitches later he realised that he could plug it into Tony Hirst’s OPML Dashboard and produce a single page that lists the last 5 posts by all the candidates. Easy-peasy – and as he said, cool.
The results are in, and no surprise Dy/Dan won best new blog: you should read him, he’s on fire.
via eFoundations.com