Frozen Planet - 7 Resources Beyond Discovery

I just watched the premiere of Discovery's new series Frozen Planet. In fact, I watched it at Discovery's headquarters then came back to my hotel room and watched part of it on television again. As I was watching Discovery had a pop-up on the television screen directing me to Discovery.com/frozenplanet for behind the scenes information and more. I was hoping to find a lot of useful classroom materials at that site, but I didn't. There are two neat infographics and a nice set of reference pages about the animals in each episode, but beyond that there isn't much more than video clips. So I decided to write a round-up some of the resources about the Arctic and Antarctic regions that I've found over the years.

The NASA Explorer channel on YouTube has some good videos about the climates of the Arctic and Antarctic regions. I've embedded Arctic Sea Ice 101 below.


ARMAP is a comprehensive resource of interactive, online maps of Arctic research. ARMAP's resources include files for use in Google Earth as well as ArcGIS explorer. You can also access 2D maps directly on the ARMAP website. ARMAP provides map layers and placemarks about a wide range of topics related to Arctic research. Before opening the general ARMAP map, visit the map gallery for a primer on the type of resources that can found on ARMAP. You should also check out the links section of ARMAP to visit the sources of much of the ARMAP content.

The Extreme Ice Survey offers a Google Earth file that displays the results of the Extreme Ice Survey. In this Google Earth file users can view glaciers, historical data about glaciers, and some video clips about shrinking glaciers. The Extreme Ice Survey website has high quality photos and time lapse videos from the surveyors. Embedded below is one of the videos from the Extreme Ice Survey.

EIS PROMO from Extreme Ice Survey on Vimeo.

Snag Learning hosts a couple of films about Antarctica. Terra Antarctica documents a six week kayaking exploration of Antarctica. The expedition was funded by National Geographic to document the effects of global warming and ecotourism on Antarctica and the world at large. Click here to watch the film and read the viewing/ discussion questions.
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Snag Learning also makes the National Geographic film Emperors of Ice available for free viewing online. In Emperors of Ice viewers will dive under the ice with the penguins, learn how the Emperor Penguins select a mate and raise young, and interact with other penguins. Viewers will see how the Emperor Penguin is uniquely equipped to survive in the harsh environment of Antarctica. Finally, Emperors of Ice, produced by National Geographic, documents the potential effects of climate change on the Emperor Penguins of Antarctica. Watch a preview of Emperors of Ice below. You can find discussion questions here.

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Frozen Planet: Explore the Polar Regions comes to us from The Open University. 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.

Explore.org offers some very nice footage of Polar Bears in their natural habitats. I've included one of the videos below.

Polar Bears International has some lesson plans for teaching about climate change, ecotourism, and conservation. You will also find links to a slideshow on Polar Bears and nice PDF about Polar Bears that contains an educational game.

Class Connect - Share, Find, and Connect on Lessons

Last week I was contacted by a nice young man and student named Eric Simons who was seeking some feedback on his new service. The service is called Class Connect.

The basic purpose of Class Connect is to provide a place for teachers to store all of the digital materials associated with their lesson plans. Teachers can store documents, images, video files, and websites (bookmarks). To help you keep your materials organized, Class Connect provides a tagging system. The tagging system allows you to use custom tags or assign Common Core standards tags from the standards menu. If you choose, you can share your materials with colleagues. Class Connect provides an option for collaboration on shared materials.

There is a community aspect to Class Connect. If you choose to, you can make your materials public so that they can be searched and viewed by other Class Connect users. There are two ways to search for lesson materials in Class Connect. You can search the shared materials by keyword or search by Common Core standard.

Applications for Education
By our good nature, teachers like to share. Class Connect makes it easy to share our best resources with each other. Sometimes it's by seeing what others have done to teach a topic that we get our best ideas for our own lessons. Maybe you are looking for a new way to teach a topic or need an idea to get your lesson plans started, have a search in Class Connect. And if you benefit from the sharing of others, return the Karma and share some of your own good resources.

Interactive Lessons About Art and Artists

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a great collection of multimedia, interactive features about art and artists. In these features you can learn about styles of art, specific works, and the artists. There is a mix of videos and slideshows contained in the interactive archive. The archive contains features about Picasso and Pollock as well as artists whose works aren't quite as famous.

Applications for Education
Art Think is a SFMOMA feature designed to introduce visitors to basics of art. Art Think contains a glossary terms and an introduction to basic uses of shapes, lines, and colors. Art Think also contains an index of dozens of lesson plans that teachers can use in the instruction of art appreciation. The lessons incorporate materials that are featured on the SFMOMA website.

Create Story Cubes With Templates from Read Write Think

Earlier this week I spent some time browsing Read Write Think and came across this lesson plan for creating biography cubes. The biography cube template is part of a larger set of four story cube templates called Cube Creators.

Cube Creators provide templates designed to break the writing process into six distinct parts. There are templates for writing biographies, mysteries, short stories, and a blank template that you can customize. Students enter the required information into the online template. When the template is completed, it can be printed with lines for cutting and folding to create an actual cube.

Applications for Education
Cube Creator templates could help students get started on a writing assignment when they're confronted with writer's block. The templates also provide guidance for outlining and formatting a story. These templates are suitable for elementary school use.

Virtual Jamestown

Virtual Jamestown is a nice site for teachers of U.S. History who would like their students to explore some digital recreations of Jamestown. Virtual Jamestown features a mix of modern 3D tours (Unity browser plug-in required) and older static timelines, images, and articles. The video below provides a 3D fly-over of Jamestown Native American village (the video does not have sound).

Virtual Jamestown: The Paspahegh Site from Dane Webster on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
In addition to the 3D virtual tours, Virtual Jamestown provides teachers with ten inquiry-driven lesson plans about Jamestown.

A Short Biography of Thomas Edison and Some Lesson Plans

In a case of YouTube's "related videos" suggestions actually being useful, after watching this video about the history of calendars, I discovered this short video biography of Thomas Edison. Even though the end of the video does reveal the producer's bias, the video does a nice job of explaining Edison's contributions to the conveniences of modern life.




Applications for Education
The video could be a good match for these Edison lessons offered through EDSITEment. EDSITEment offers four lesson activities that are designed to be used together, but with some slight modifications they could be used individually. The purpose of the EDSITEment lessons is to get students to investigate and analyze how Edison's inventions influenced life in the early 20th Century and how those inventions have influenced life today.

On a related note, if you're ever in the Fort Myers, Florida area, I highly recommend visiting the Edison & Ford Winter Estates.

Learn Chemistry - Videos, Lessons, and an Interactive Periodic Table

Learn Chemistry is a production of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The purpose of Learn Chemistry is provide educators with resources for teaching chemistry lessons to students of all ages. The database of instructional resources has more than 2700 entries organized according to topic, age of students, and media type.

 A couple of resources for middle school and high school lessons that stand out are the Faces of Chemistry video series and the Visual Elements Periodic Table. The Faces of Chemistry is a set of short videos that explain how chemistry is an integral part of three fairly common activities; hair coloring, farming, and car exhaust control. The Face of Chemistry videos are targeted toward students between eleven and fourteen years of age. The first video in the series is embedded below.


The Visual Elements Periodic Table is an interactive display of the Periodic Table of Elements. Click on any element in the table to reveal important information about that element. Many of the element information pages include short videos.

Applications for Education
Whether you teach elementary school, middle school, or high school students, Learn Chemistry seems to have something for everyone. Check out the Learn Chemistry Wiki to see materials developed by other teachers, share your own materials, and find partners for collaborative lessons.

Teaching Channel - Best Practice Videos and Lessons

Teaching Channel is a collection of videos of teachers demonstrating their best practices. The videos are categorized according to grade level, subject, and topic. You will find examples of classroom management techniques and examples of teachers carrying out their best lesson plans. The lesson plan videos are accompanied by documents  detailing the lessons. The classroom management videos are accompanied by tip sheets.


If you register on the Teaching Channel website you can download videos, take and save notes on each video, and take advantage of a lesson planning tool to organize your lessons.

Applications for Education
Teaching Channel could be a good place for pre-service teachers to see some good modeling of instructional methods. If you're a veteran teacher looking for some new ideas about how to teach a particular topic, the Teaching Channel could have what you need.

One Month Left to Enter The Kids' Science Challenge

Back in October I wrote about the Kids' Science Challenge. A post on Fred Delventhal's blog just reminded me about it. There is one month left for students in grades three through six to enter the Kids' Science Challenge.

The Kids' Science Challenge is a national (United States) contest for students in grades three through six. The challenge asks students to innovate and build upon on our current conceptions of how things work. There are three areas of innovation in this year's contest; reducing waste, developing meals to be eaten on Mars, and developing a toy or game that demonstrates an animal's intelligence. The contest is open until February 29, 2012.

Applications for Education
To help students start thinking about the topics in The Kids' Science Challenge, the challenge website has a series of games and videos for students. For teachers, The Kids' Science Challenge offers a page of lesson plans and hands-on activities designed to help students develop ideas related to the contest's three challenge topics.

Econ Ed Link - Economics Lessons and Games

Produced by the Council for Economic Education, Econ Ed Link hosts hundreds of lesson plans and interactive games for teaching students about a wide range of topics in economics. Teachers can search the lesson plan index by grade level, concept, standard, or length of lesson (one class period vs. multiple class periods). Most of the lessons attempt to provide "real world" context.

The interactive section of Econ Ed Link offers four pages of videos and games. The videos and games can be used as stand-alone activities or as part of lesson plan. I tested out the interactive game on developing good credit habits. Developing Good Credit Habits is a game appropriate for middle school and high school students. Students earn money by correctly answering questions about credit scores, interest rates, and spending practices. The purpose of the game is to purchase items and pay expenses without damaging your credit score.

Applications for Education
Econ Ed Link offers lesson plans appropriate for all K-12 students. Many of the lessons are designed for use not only in the classroom but in the home as well. The parent section of Econ Ed Link offers good material that you can send home with your students to get parents involved in students' learning about personal economics.

Free Download - Ten Digital Storytelling Projects

A couple of months ago I put out a call for readers who were interested in sharing their digital storytelling projects to get in touch with me. There was a good response to that call. From those responses came ten digital storytelling projects developed and conducted by educators just like you and me. I assembled the stories, added some content of my own, and put together the PDF that you should see embedded below. Please feel free to download the document from Issuu, Docstoc, or Scribd.

Open publication - Free publishing - More education

10 Digital Storytelling Projects

Science Fair Project Ideas from Education.com

The second half of the school year seems to be when the most science fairs happen. If you and your students are looking for some ideas for science fair projects, Education.com offers some good ideas that you can use as-is or adapt to fit your specific situation. On the Education.com Science Fair page you can specify a grade level and a field of science to find project ideas suitable for your students.

Education.com offers a set of widgets that you can embed into your professional resources blog or website. The widgets offered link to resources developed by Education.com. I've embedded the Activities Widget below. The widget should link you to hands-on activities for teaching social studies. You can customize the widget to show content for any subject and or grade level that you like.

Education.com Activities

Social Studies Activities

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