iNaturalist - Record and Share Observations of Nature

iNaturalist is a community website for sharing pictures and observations of plants and animals. To enable easy sharing of observations, iNaturalist offers a free Android app and a free iOS app. Using the apps you can take a picture, geo-locate it, write your observations, and upload to the iNaturalist community. If your observation is incomplete, for example if you're not sure of a scientific name, you can ask the community to add comments to improve the recording of your observation.

If you don't want to join the iNaturalist community, you can simply explore members' observations through the iNaturalist Google Map.

Applications for Education
I learned about iNaturalist through an excellent post on the Google Lat Long Blog that outlined the efforts of a group to compile a large collection of observations about the Pepperwood Preserve in California. Pick a woodlot or nature preserve in your area and have your school build a record of observations about that area.

What is a Tsunami? A Video Explanation

Explania is a good place to find video explanations and interactive images that explain all kinds of things from the worlds of science, technology, sports, and health. Today, on Explania I discovered this excellent animated explanation of tsunamis. The two and a half minute video explains how tsunamis are created and the impact of tsunamis when they reach land. The video is embedded below.


Tsunami Infographic from Shal on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
Unfortunately, the world saw plenty of footage last year of the tsunami in Japan. That provided plenty of visuals on the damage caused by tsunamis. This video provides a good way for students to see how a tsunami is formed. Here are a few other resources that you could also use in lessons about tsunamis: Tsunami Mapper, Tsunamis 101, Stop Disasters.

Economy Map - Visualizations of the US Economy's Environmental Impact

Economy Map is an interactive visualization of the environmental impact of the U.S. economy. The visualization offers a series of graphs and charts that represent the impact of economic activities in terms of global warming, ozone depletion, human toxicity, aquatic ecotoxicity, acidification, and other environmental impact measurements. Economy Map users can expand or contract the scope of the visualizations according to industry sectors and environmental impact indicators.

Economy Map can be viewed online or downloaded and run as a free-standing Java applet. Either way you do have to register to use Economy Map. The video below provides a brief introduction to Economy Map. 

Applications for Education
Those of you who have watched and or taught lessons based around the ideas presented in the Story of Stuff may find Economy Map to be a good follow-up resource.

Frozen Planet - An Interactive Exploration of the Poles

The Open University is a fantastic place to discover all kinds of valuable educational materials. From time to time I find myself getting lost in the content both on The Open University's website and The Open University's various YouTube channels. I was doing just that recently when I discovered Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions.

Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions features an interactive display through which you can view the history of polar exploration and the science of the polar regions. The interactive display is created through the use of the Google Earth browser plug-in and a timeline. You can click along the timeline to see and read placemarks on Google Earth. You can browse through and click on a list of important places in both polar regions. For further investigation and analysis of the polar regions you can activate a number of Google Earth layers within the Frozen Planet display. The display also includes videos about each region although the playlist for the Antarctic region is much longer than the playlist for the Arctic region.

Applications for Education
Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions could be a good resource for both science and history teachers. In fact, Frozen Planet could be the basis for an interdisciplinary unit at the middle school or high school level.

Here's a fun fact that I learned through Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions, five years after being the first person to stand on top of Mount Everest Sir Edmund Hillary was part of the team that completed the first complete crossing of Antarctica .