WVSKPhillips Domain

Which country lets you visit both cities of Edinborough and Glasgow? Where can you see stalactites?

Remember these questions from the wonderful folks over at BrainQuest? Those  marvelous flip books which kept thousands of us entertained on the road and we now are trying to get our own children interested in learning various tidbits in the hopes of landing a Jeopardy slot someday.

Now, even better, these books are available for free over at Scribd! Scribd is a free place provided by Google to allow us to jot something down and publish it. In a nutshell it is “largest social publishing company in the world — the website where more than 60 million people each month discover and share original writings and documents.” (See here)

You can browse for items to read and even save them to a “reading list”.

I think this would also be a great activity for Smart Boards and allowing the students to take charge of the activity.

So – do you know which has the most gravity: a supernova, a white dwarf, or a black hole?

Ok – don’t let the “podcast” part of that scare you off. The website 60-Second Science is just chocked full of science tidbits and the podcast is only one part of it. You can also find archives of past podcasts here. The postings are written for down to earth people to read and comprehend the extremely intelligent part of science. This is great for teachers who rarely have the time to distill the “science-ese” out of publications and interpret for their classrooms. Of all the curriculums, science is the most dynamic and often times the most difficult to stay current with.

The podcast part of the site is found in the middle of the screen, right at the top. You can subscribe to it using iTunes to keep updated when new podcasts are posted – or you can just click on “play” and just listen through your browser. This would be a wonderful way to start a class – to hook the kids right in with something that is current and relevent to them – and not just in science classes either.

EdTech Action Network

Pres. Bush is recommending zero funding for educational technology funding for the next budget. The above link gives more information and to the right of the page is a box that you can put in your zip code and you’ll be taken to a page with pre-written letters for your Congressional members about this issue. It does ask for you contact information at the bottom of the page to verify you are a real person and not a computer.

This is important – our kids, our grandkids, our neighborhood kids need to be kept competitive with the world and cutting the budget isn’t how it’s done.