Instructify

BY EMILY JACK

In Europe in the early 1600s, witch hunts were common practice and people were burned at the stake. Health care included bloodletting and surgery without anesthesia. And expeditions to the so-called New World were launching a new era of cruelty and genocide. But even during those dark times, a scientific revolution was underway that would change the way humans understood themselves and their place in the world forever.

It was 1609 when Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the skies and began the observations that ushered in modern astronomy. 400 years later, the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO have declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy to honor Galileo and to celebrate the advances in astronomy since his time.

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BY BILL FERRIS

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.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

Understandably, this summer has included a lot of reminiscing about the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing, as this year was its 40th anniversary. Since it’s also the International Year of Astronomy, I thought a review of a really cool website related to the moon landing was in order. A really spectacular resource I’ve found is called We Choose the Moon, a multimedia, interactive site created by the JFK Presidential Library.

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.

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BY NICK YINGLING

According to the plot summary for Teen Wolf on Wikipedia, “High school student Scott Howard is seventeen years old, sick of being average and wishing he were special… Scott keeps undergoing changes and eventually undergoes a complete change and becomes a wolf… During the final basketball game, Scott refuses to “wolf out” and insists on winning the game on his own.”

Isn’t that heart-warming? The message is just be yourself!

So, what does Teen Wolf have to do with anything here? (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Want to feel insignificant? No, you say? I’ll take that as a yes.

If you were already feeling like a tiny speck of dust in the universe, these YouTube¹ videos will show you just how tiny we are in the grand scheme of the universe. Each video sizes up Earth against the larger planets in the solar system, and the sun, which in turn gets dwarfed by the hypergiant stars in our galaxy.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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The early buzz about the world wide web was that it would throw open the floodgates of the world’s accumulated knowledge, creating a window into the cultures of the most far-flung places on earth. We instead got lolcats, pop-up ads, and meaningless quizzes about which superhero you are.

Fortunately, some wise folks had an eye on that original idyllic vision all along, and those folks now bring us the World Digital Library. A project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the site provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.

These cultural treasures include maps, photographs, manuscripts, audio and video recordings and more, and there’s at least one item from every UNESCO member country. The WDL’s interface is phenomenal, offering beautiful, high-resolution scans with incredible zooming capability. Check out this 18th century Japanese woodblock print; you can zoom in close enough to see individual paper fibers.

The site is also exceptionally easy to navigate — perhaps dangerously so, if you like looking at pretty pictures and are prone to losing track of time. You can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, or contributing institution, and the site is navigable in seven different languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The possibilities for using the WDL in the classroom are nearly endless: Social studies teachers, obviously, will find a treasure trove of primary source materials, but they can also show works created contemporaneously from around the globe for any era, enabling students to develop a holistic sense of global history. Second-language teachers can have students view culturally significant items in their target language. English language arts teachers can identify exquisite images, audio, and video for use as writing prompts. And the ability to browse by topic provides opportunities for use by those often-neglected STEM teachers: Among the topics to choose from is “natural science and mathematics,” which can be further limited to astronomy, geometry, medicine, physics, etc.

An entry under the topic “mathematical geography” is a 15th-century Egyptian book called A Guide for the Perplexed on the Drawing of the Circle of Projection. Many thanks to the World Digital Library for raising our collective IQ. This is what I always knew the internet could be. -EMILY JACK

World Digital Library

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Visit the Library of Congress online

Access Primary Sources Online with the Perseus Digital Library

Check out ibiblio, the Online Library

Here’s a quick YouTube video that deals with amazing facts about the thing that our world revolved around — the sun. Learn about what causes sun spots, the northern lights, and solar winds. This NASA-produced video is a good introduction to a unit on the solar system. If your school blocks YouTube, just download it to your thumb drive in bring it with you to class. -BILL FERRIS

Secrets of a Dynamic Sun

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Peek into space with Windows on the Universe

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Ever wonder what’s the lifespan of a flea? Or how sunscreen works? Or who developed the Nobel-worthy invention of the TV dinner?* Of course you haven’t, but that’s not the point. As any person who has won a trivia contest will tell you, it’s fun to show off knowledge of obscure facts in any subject. Like music and sports, science is a subject that lends itself especially well to this sort of trivia. You can find lots of it at Everyday Mysteries: Fun Science Facts from the Library of Congress.

The site groups its facts into categories like physics, technology, zoology and plant life. Personally, I enjoy browsing through the questions listed on the site and just see what I can learn. Everyday Mysteries is a great place to begin stockpiling questions for a classroom trivia contest, or if you’re in the mood to learn fun facts about a particular topic.  -BILL FERRIS

Everyday Mysteries: Fun Science Facts from the Library of Congress

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Think you know geography? Take this quiz

* 30-90 days, by combining organic and inorganic active ingredients, and several geniuses, respectively.

Photo credit: mastrobiggo on Flickr.

10 High Fliers on Twitter
Still struggling to figure out how to use microblogging app/distraction engine Twitter for educational purposes? The Chronicle of Higher Education lists 10 exemplary Twitterers from the edusphere. Follow these folks for insight and ideas on how you can use Twitter to interact with your students, stay up-to-date with education news, network with fellow teachers, or come up with ideas for your classroom. Number four on the list: former Instructify writer Amanda French.

18 cool sites and apps that teach you about space
Learn more about the final frontier with this list of sites. You’ll find stuff from NASA, simulations of solar systems, space weather, solar flares and lots more. You’ll probably recognize a few of these sites from previous Instructify articles, but try to act surprised anyway. Don’t worry, there are plenty of new ones, too.

Ten Commandments of eLearning
Integrating technology into teaching isn’t easy, especially if you’re used to doing things the old-fashioned way. If you’re trying to figure out where to begin, or you’ve unsuccessfully tried classroom blogging or discussion forums, read this article from Cath Ellis, an English English teacher (she lives in the UK) who blogs about technology in education. She takes an approach other successful ed-tech users have extolled — focus on what you want to do, then pick the technology that will help you do it.

8 Unconventional Student Research Projects
Are your students bored by the same old research projects and science fair ideas? Tell them to have a look at this list of unique projects compiled by the fine folks at StudentHacks. While these particular projects were for college courses, it wouldn’t kill your kids to be ambitious with their projects. Also, after reading about projects like crickets playing Pac-Man or using Star Wars to teach recursion in computer science classes, they might get inspired to do something really creative. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: delgrosso on Flickr.

Back when Pluto was a planet, my middle school students spent a lot of time learning about the solar system. We used the usual sites — NASA, NinePlanets — but a site like Windows on the Universe would have been great to know about back then.

Windows on the Universe offers information on each planet, presented at three levels (hello, differentiated learning) consisting of beginner, intermediate, and advanced. It also offers other space-related information like star maps, mythology, weather, even art based on space.

In addition to all the great information for students, the site has an extensive collection of activities for teachers to employ in the classroom. While much of the site is great, you will find pockets of outdated information. The Mars tour, for instance, hasn’t been updated since 2000 — long before the Mars Rovers landed. Finally, of course, there are the requisite games for kids, mostly puzzles and word games that are not terribly scientific beyond the vocabulary words used to create them. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Windows on the Universe

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See the planets in motion with the Solar System Visualizer

Study the Planets First-Hand with My Solar System

It’s time again for our random roundup. This month’s theme: NASA, pioneers of space and subjects of an awful lot of posts.

Do-it-yourself is in, even with podcasting at NASA!
It seems that every time you turn around these days someone’s encouraging you to complete a DIY project.  Why pay for someone else to do it when you can do it yourself?  Apparently, NASA has the same attitude on its website on Do-It-Yourself Podcasts.

Set the controls for the closest planet to the sun: NASA Mission to Mercury
This site includes up-to-the-minute clocks that record the elapsed time of the mission as well as the Orbit Insertion time. Watch the actual August 3, 2004 launch of Messenger from mission control. You can take your class through a tour of images already taken by Messenger as it zooms toward Mercury.

Blast Off with the NASA Kids’ Club
NASA Kids’ Club is a great way to learn more about space exploration. It’s got great pictures, games and activities that will pique the interest of space-minded kids. As a no-cost way to learn about the space program, the NASA Kids’ Club is the Right Stuff.

Observe NASA’s Earth Observatory
What if we were able to turn our telescopes around and get a closer look at what is happening right below our feet? The folks at NASA have done just that with their Earth Observatory site. Teachers, head right for the Experiments tab and give your students interactive ways to study global warming and plant biomes around the world. If you love reading blogs (and I know you do!), check out the Expedition to Siberia blog that offers almost daily updates and pictures of this fascinating trip.

Cool satellite image from the inauguration
Check out this great picture from the presidential inauguration. As the GeoEye-1 satellite hurtled through the cosmos,  it took this snapshot to commemorate the historic occasion. That’s a lot of people! Not only that, I now know the roof of the Capitol is tarheel blue.

Observe Mars in 3D
Still have some of those promotional 3D glasses kicking around from after the Superbowl? Fire up one of NASA’s 3D image galleries to take your students on a tour of Mars.

Still have some of those promotional 3D glasses kicking around from after the Superbowl? Fire up one of NASA’s 3D image galleries to take your students on a tour of Mars.

When the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on the red planet in 2004, they began sending back views of Mars that had never been seen before. NASA has an entire gallery devoted to just 3D images taken by Spirit and Opportunity, and students can explore from their classroom. Pull the shades, set up an LCD projector, hand out the glasses, and have your students observe the landscape. What do they see? What do they want to know more about? Remind them that this is how real scientists work, using the same images. After hearing your students observations, see how well they match up with what the NASA scientists explain in the captions.

Mars isn’t the only place to go — now you CAN look directly at the sun (okay, a picture of the sun , the old rule still applies for the real sun) to see it in 3D, too. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Mars Rover 3D gallery

Sun 3D gallery

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Explore Mars Now

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Many, many changes have taken place in the world since we last visited Google Earth. I don’t mean changes in the outside world. No, that’s a terrible place! I mean the world you can explore inside of the latest update for Google Earth.

Google Earth 5 has a bunch of new content for you to use in the classroom. In fact, there are too many new features for me to break down in a short amount of time. So here is a quick spotlight on them.

1. First, as always, set aside five minutes for your students to locate their own house. It is inevitable.
2. See how places have changed thanks to more historical image content. Not only is it cool to watch buildings grow and towns expand, but this is also useful for lessons on the environment. Check out urban sprawl, tropical deforestation in the rain forests and the melting of ice caps.
3. The Earthquake layer is very cool. Every site is linked to info about the magnitude, depth and date of the earthquake. Zoom way out and it pretty much paints a picture of where the tectonic plates are all fussing and feuding.
4. The Touring feature allows users to create and share narrated tours as they move around in Google Earth. I’m not quite sold on this one, personally. Then again, people have described me as being a spleen. But let’s be honest—even the best tour is still a tour. Google Earth is most fun when you go off the beaten path and explore.
5. Google Mars 3D allows you to check out high-res images and terrain of the angry red planet. I’ve just spent 20 minutes bumping around Cydonia looking for the Face on Mars. The first person to provide me some coordinates wins a chance to hear me discuss the 2000 sci-fi movie Mission to Mars.
6. One of the biggest and most publicized additions to Google Earth is all of the ocean-related content. With numerous content layers from scientists and researchers, you can now explore the other 70 percent of our planet. Check out the Mariana Trench and a bunch of shipwrecks.

The classroom uses for Google Earth are plentiful, so I don’t think you’ll run into problems working it into a lesson or two. -NICK YINGLING

UPDATE — They found the lost city of Atlantis! But then the Illuminati were quick to discredit that. Hm, weird… My coffee tastes like almonds now. That’s strange…adgrgfd….

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Travel the world with Google Earth 4.3