Meet Me at the Corner is a new website offering more than 40 fun, educational videos for children ages six through twelve. The videos on Meet Me at the Corner feature students as hosts interviewing authors and artists, teaching a short lesson, or showing off the landmarks of New York City. I watched a couple of the featured videos this morning, one video explained pop-up books and illustrations, the other video featured a student talking to the curator of the Money Museum who briefly explained the history of money. The quality of both videos was very good.

Applications for Education
Meet Me at the Corner includes links related to the content of each video. The links are listed next to each video as “fun activities” and “learning activities.” Meet Me at the Corner has a kids corner where students can find writing and drawing contests.

• No Related Post

This TED Talk features Stuart Brown discussing the importance of play for children and for adults. If you have the time to watch it, I highly recommend it. Mr. Brown reminds us and explains to us why playtime is a learning time for children and for adults.

A related resource that you may want to explore is Teaching With TED.

• No Related Post

In the last couple of weeks I’ve come across a handful of good resources for teaching about energy creation and energy consumption. My most recent find is a Google Earth tour. The non-profit organization Appalachian Voices has created a narrated Google Earth tour that demonstrates destruction of a coal mining practice known as mountain top removal. You can access the tour here.

Applications for Education
After watching this Google Earth tour you could have students discuss and research alternative mining practices and alternative fuel sources.

A couple of related resources that may be of interest to you are:
NEED - National Energy Education Development
SEREF - Wind and Solar Power Estimation Activities
Planet Green Game
Google Earth Geothermal Resources Layer

• No Related Post

Nutshell Mail is a new service that allows you to consolidate all of your email accounts, Facebook, and Twitter accounts into one centralized service. Nutshell Mail is compatible with the major webmail providers and can be configured to work with most corporate/ academic email services. So that your primary email inbox isn’t constantly bombarded with updates you can schedule the frequency and timing of Nutshell updates. Each email you receive from Nutshell Mail will contain the latest updates and notifications from all of your email and social networking services. Nutshell email also allows parents to configure their accounts to receive updates from their children’s email accounts.

The video below gives a brief overview of Nutshell Mail.

Applications for Education
Nutshell Mail is one of the services that I will probably start recommending to parents that are looking for methods through which they can monitor their childrent’s online behavior.

Here are a couple of related resources in which you might be interested:
ZillaDog - Kid Friendly, Parent Monitored Email
Phishing Detection Education
KidRex - Kid Safe Search

• No Related Post

Star Child, produced by NASA, is an online learning center for young astronomers and their teachers. Star Child offers content designed on two levels for younger and older elementary school students. Star Child has activities that students can do independently online and offline activities that students and teachers can do together. One of the great things about Star Child is that each student information page contains an audio recording (in Quicktime) explaining the content to students. These audio recordings make Star Child accessible to students regardless of reading ability. For ESL/ EFL students, Star Child is available in German, Italian, Portuguese, and is soon to be available in Spanish.

Teachers at the middle school and high school levels looking for Astronomy lesson ideas should visit NASA’s Imagine the Universe website. In addition to lesson plans, you can also locate podcasts and participate in the Ask an Astrophysicist program.

Applications for Education
Star Child provides a nice mix of online and offline activities that is ideal for elementary school classrooms that have limited access to the Internet.

Here are a couple of related resources that might be of interest to you:
NASA Quests and Challenges
Nine Planets - Tour of the Solar System

• No Related Post