Mathnet on YouTube

I Tweeted this last night and it got reTweeted a bunch of times so I thought I should share it here for people who missed it. When I was in elementary school I really enjoyed watching Mathnet on PBS. For those that aren't familiar with it, Mathnet was part of Square One which was a show designed to teach math lessons in a fun way. I did a quick search on YouTube for Mathnet and sure enough many of the stories are available in their entirety on YouTube. I don't know what kind of copyright restrictions are or are not being broken by the people who uploaded the videos, so I can't say if the videos will be up forever. In the meantime if you want to show an episode to your students or just want to feel a bit of elementary school nostalgia, I've embedded a few episodes below.







And who can forget Mathman?!

Learn About Physics Through the Circus

In 2010 PBS aired a short series called Circus. Circus was a documentary about the Big Apple Circus. The show took viewers behind the scenes of a traveling circus production. All six of the episodes are currently available to watch online. Today, through a Tweet by Danny Nicholson I learned that the Circus website offers some short circus-based physics lessons.

Circus Physics is a series of eight short videos. Each of the videos features a circus act that demonstrates a basic principle of physics. Each video clip is accompanied by text and image explanations. I've embedded the Newton's Laws of Motion video below.

Watch Circus Physics: Newton's Laws of Motion on PBS. See more from Circus.

Chronicles of the American Revolution

Liberty, The American Revolution is a feature on PBS.org. There are a couple of resources in this feature that are worth noting. First, and probably the most useful, is The Chronicle of Revolution. The Chronicle of Revolution provides a timeline of events that contributed to the start of the American Revolution. Students can read newspaper accounts as they go through the chronicles. Within each newspaper account are links to further reading about important people and places mentioned in the articles.

The second item of interest in Liberty, The American Revolution is the Road to Revolution game. The game isn't really a game, it's more like a quiz with some graphics added to it. The game is designed to quiz students on the information in The Chronicle of Revolution.

Applications for Education
The Chronicle of Revolution and the Road to Revolution are best suited to use with middle school students or possibly older elementary school students. Neither resource will replace your textbooks, but they certainly make good supplements to them.

Please click here for seven more resources for teaching about the American Revolution.