Earth Day - in case you still haven't used any online sites...

A couple of days ago I listed 9 good sites to use for studying about issues associated with Earth Day. If you haven't had a chance to look at those yet, there is still time. As everything I post on EdTechSec, they are all easy to use and it takes just a second to begin using them.

From David Warlick's blog, 2¢ Worth, I looked at two more great Earth Day online learning games that are quick, free, and easy and engaging for kids.

The first is Elf Island. Elf Island is aimed at "tweens", which in game language could mean any kids from 2nd grade to 12th grade would stand a good chance of liking it. Registration is quick and painless, and kids under 12 must use their parent's email address. Absolutely NO personal information is given or exchanged in the game so it is very secure. The idea behind the virtual world of Elf Island is to empower kids to do good. Through entertaining and competitive gameplay, storytelling and social interaction, Elf Island players help non-profit partners achieve their goals on real projects. The more kids are Gaming for Good within Elf Island, the more Elf Island is revealed. Elf Island also recognizes and rewards kids who practice Good in the world through status and awards.

The second game is Emerald Island. Again, just a quick registration which consists of a username (no real name on either of these), an email address, and that's it - ready to play. Emerald Island is for younger students, or intermediate students who may struggle with reading. Students have to "create" their avatar/character, and then they find themselves on the Pirats (yes, that's pi"rats") ship. The Pirats quickly kick the player off the ship and you soon find yourself washed up on Emerald Island, the last green island around. The next few minutes are spent orienting the player to Emerald Island, then you can engage in all kinds of games and activities while you get to know the island and your neighbors. Most of the activities are "green" and involve motivation to keep Emerald Island green.

Both of these games are easy for students to jump right into, and manage to work in lots of educational eco-information in a realistic and thoughtful way.

These fun games can make a great addition to Earth Day activities.

The 3rd grade class at Tok School will be hosting an Earth Day celebration from 1:00pm to 1:30pm on Wednesday, April 22. The students will be making some healthy snacks to share, showing off some of the Earth Day crafts they have made (pencil holders, bird feeders, personalized pet food scoopers, and jewelry - all made from re-used materials that otherwise would have ended up in the landfill). The 3rd graders will also be available to show some of the other elementary students some of the fun Earth Day online games and activities they have learned how to use during the past week.

Learn about Earth Day through online activities

Earth Day is coming up - April 22 is the date to celebrate! Until then, you can spend a little or a lot of classroom time teaching your students about the history of Earth Day, about recycling, renewable and non-renewable resources, carbon foot prints and all kinds of exciting stuff!

There are a million good educational sites about Earth Day - a simple search will turn up more pages than you would ever care to look at. So for the purposes of this post, and in keeping with the theme of "EdTechSec", I have narrowed the list down to 9 that span all grades, require NO registration or sign up, have been widely reviewed as being high quality, and are EASY teaching tools that students can sit right down and use.

For young beginning readers, Starfall has a great reading activity on their site called "Every day is Earth Day". It is in Starfall's typical format, and kids can use the site themselves to navigate through a story about Earth Day while also learning how to pronounce key words - this is a great independent activity for young kids, and very informative as well.

No Earth Day study is complete without figuring out our "footprint". There are lots of calculators out there, but this one for kids called Zerofootprint is the easiest and most user friendly. Most elementary students can use it unassisted.

For intermediate and junior high grades, Scholastic News has some great (and good reading level) articles about Earth Day, and what kinds of activities and community projects kids are doing in different places around the U.S. to make this day meaningful. These are great independent online readings kids can do as a tie-in to classroom activities.

For older students, the History Channel has a nice page with videos, a section called "What Can I Do" for ideas about how people can get active about conservation, and a tool (more appropriate for older students) for how to calculate your "footprint". There is also a downloadable podcast that kids could listen to (for homework??).

One of my favorites in this list - Starbucks Coffee is hosting a cool site called the "Planet Green Game". This is a pretty neat simulation in which the player must explore a fictitious town called Evergreen to look for ways to reduce CO2 emissions. It's a really engaging game that kids in intermediate grades through high school would really like. There are lots of challenges along the way to help the player earn points. The point of the game is to promote the idea of looking beyond traditional ways of doing business to reduce our impact on the planet. No registration, just click on the link and start playing!

Of course PBS Kids has their EekoWorld site replete with games, videos, and activities that are appropriate for all elementary students. Lots of good information and activities on recycling, air, and water quality that kids can understand. Kids can easily navigate this site.

Another online educational standard - Scholastic - has a neat game called "Virtual Forest Challenge". It takes kids through a typical kid day, where they are called upon to constantly make choices about how their actions will affect the environment. At the end of the game, they can see their score which identifies how much positive or negative impact they had on the environment in a typical day. Great for elementary kids - no registration, just play - very user-friendly.

One more great interactive for older students is a site called Consumer Consequences. The premise is that the earth couldn't support all its residents if everyone lived like a typical American. The activity will give the player an idea of how many planets it would take to support our lifestyle on a planetary scale, and ideas about how to make our footprint a little smaller.

Planet Pals hosts a site aimed at elementary students (and their teachers and parents) that is packed full of information, lesson ideas, activities for home and school, and games. It's all educational, simple to access, and kid friendly!

Finally, a site that is just dedicated to Earth Day arts and crafts - there are a wealth of ideas on here for some easy "recyclable" crafts that bring home the idea of Earth Day. A wide range of ages would enjoy these, and none look difficult. I am especially intrigued by the dog food scooper made out of a laundry detergent bottle!

International Migratory Bird Day

International Migratory Bird Day is coming soon so mark your calendars and start planning your lessons with an eye to this great educational event! Officially IMBD takes place the second Saturday in May - however, it is recognized that that date doesn't always work well for organizations wanting to plan celebrations around the event. Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge is hosting their Migratory Bird Festival in celebration of the even on the 3rd Saturday in May - the 16th, in Tok.

So far their website doesn't offer any specific information on the project, however, Kay Lynn Odle-Moore and Mary Timm have emailed fliers and offers of their assistance with educational activities for the Bird Festival. You can contact either of them by email - just type their first name, underscore, last name @fws.gov (I'm "coding" their email addresses so they won't get spammed).

You can find out more about IMBD at birdday.org. This great IMBD site offers a lot of resources for educators - lesson plans, art projects, and great links to sites like BirdIQ for virtual field trips. You can also order some teaching resources and very reasonably priced merchandise from their site. I couldn't resist ordering this t-shirt with fantastic artwork for only $12.95.

If you are looking for online resources to use in your classroom, you won't be able to find much better than the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's "All About Birds" website. You can search out information about any bird you can think of - and many you never knew about. Information is complete with pictures, tons of information, some video, and a great feature right on the site - mp3 audio files of the bird song! It's a very user-friendly site for kids as well. Another cool feature of this site is eBird - which is where birders - even amateurs - can submit their pictures, data, and observations! It's like the Wikipedia of birding!

So mark your calendars, contact these educators at TNWR, and check out these sites for a great science and social studies educational opportunity right here in our area that your students can look forward to and participate in!

Take your kids on a Dinosaur Dig

This is a fun site I used recently in class with my 3rd graders as we were studying fossils - it's called Dinosaurs and it's on the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History site. This tidy looking little site is actually jam packed with information about dinosaurs that is very accessible to kids from 2nd grade through high school.

On the Dinosaurs site, kids can learn just about anything they ever wanted to know (and never knew they wanted to know) about dinosaurs. There are tons of great pictures from the museum's archives as well as the many digs and expeditions that supplied the information.

There are some slideshows documenting some of the various digs, as well as some of the more prominent dinosaur collections at the Smithsonian NMNH.

What my 3rd graders were enamored with was an interactive "dinosaur dig". After we studied fossils, looked at some real ones, and then did a little play simulation with some clay and toy skeletons, they were ready for the dinosaur dig. The interactive takes kids through the basic procedures of a dig - from the first clearing of the surface to determine how big the site is, to the use of finer and finer tools to carefully get to the skeleton, to the plastering and transportation of the bones to the museum. Once they have successfully cleared, covered, and transported their "specimen", they then clean it and protect it in the museum's lab. After that they are ready to assemble the skeleton - they can use the clues about the various bones to help them find the proper placement. Once their model is finished, they can see different drawings and representations of what that dinosaur (a Stegosaurus) might have looked like.

This is a really engaging site and very easy for kids and their teachers to navigate. What I really liked was that none of the links take you away from the site - they are all built by the Smithsonian NMNH, so all of the information flows and connects really well.

A model of the solar system - better than papier-mache!

Gunn Interactive Web Design has built a fantastic visualization of the solar system. Simply begin this Planets site and the clock starts to tick! The slide arrows at the bottom give information about what is happening and explain how the model shows different perspectives of the solar system. As this commentary is going, the model is still moving along with the time and date ticker going.

Planets would be a great visualization to use with any class from elementary to high school that is studying any aspect of astronomy or the solar system. For elementary students it is a great way to see how the earth and the other planets orbit the sun. For other students it can present lots of great problem solving "quests" where the students can use the model to try to determine how many rotations other planets make in comparison to earth, and other such relative questions about orbits, speed, and time.

Planets is one of the best visualizations of the solar system I have seen online - you can control lots of elements about the model, such as the speed of the orbits, the scale of the planets, and best of all, which object you are following. This really will give some great perspective on the movement of the planets relative to each other and to the sun.

You have to try this - as soon as you get to the Planets site the visualization begins!

How much do YOU know about the Nobel Prize?

We hear about Nobel Prize winners once in awhile - we might even be able to name a few if we think about it for a minute. But many adults and most kids don't really understand what the Nobel Prize is or what kinds of people get it. NobelPrize.org is a pretty cool site that breaks down the actual prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics, and peace - the one we probably hear the most about), includes information about past winners, and features many educational games associated with the prize winners and their fields.

Here is a little blurb about the actual founder:

At the age of 17, Swedish Alfred Nobel spoke five languages fluently. Nobel became an inventor and businessman, and at the time of his death on 10 December 1896, he had 355 patents worldwide – one of them was the patent on dynamite. Furthermore, he had started 87 companies all over the world. According to his will, Alfred Nobel's enormous fortune was to be used to establish prizes to award those who had done their best to benefit mankind in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, five years after Nobel's death.

The rest of the NobelPrize.org site is the really interesting part - the games! These are not just silly games either - they are interesting for junior high and high school students, as well as adults. All of the games have to do with ideas developed and promoted by Nobel Prize winners. One that I checked out was, of course, Lord of the Flies - one of my very favorite books! The game brings out the themes that the author, William Golding, was celebrated for when he won his Nobel Prize. I played and guess what? I do know that book pretty well! The other was Pavlov's Dog - it was a pretty simple demonstration of how his experiment worked but included a lot of other interesting information about his experiments.
There are a lot of games on the site like The Blood Typing Game, Tuburculosis, The DNA double helix game, The Electrocardiogram game and the Malaria game, just to name a few. As you can tell by their titles, there is a lot more "educational" than "game" going on here.
This is a really interesting way to engage students in the field of study pursued by any particular Nobel Winner, and to introduce kids to the Prize itself and the kinds of innovation, creativity, and possibility it promotes.

A physics interactive to challenge all levels

Fantastic Contraption is a web interactive where your challenge is to build a machine from simple parts to move objects to a goal. Yes - physics is the main focus of this activity but anyone (even teachers) can test, test, and re-try with this! There is a short tutorial that explains the simple parts and what they do and explains the objective (move your machine to the pink box). The controls are easy to manipulate and you will find yourself building a Fantastic Contraption before you know it.

Fantastic Contraption is a great tool for elementary students studying simple machines - you can easily incorporate the concepts into this interactive play. There are endless levels, so even more advanced students in physics will find ample challenges.

If you choose to register (you don't have to) you can save your levels of play and your devices and share them on the site, as well as seeing what others have done - there is no one right way to complete the objective!
For those students or teachers who have an iPhone or iPod Touch, Fantastic Contraption is available as an app for $4.99. Try it out online for free first.

You and your students can explore any "ology" that interests you

Ology is a section of the American Museum of Natural History's website for kids. Students can explore paleontology, archeology, water, astronomy, biodiversity, earth, "Einstein", genetics, or marine biology. There are fun activities within these "ologies" to explore, like the live lizard and snake cam, making your own marine biology stationery, describing space and time in the 4th dimension, just to name a very few. Ology is a fun site to play around with for teachers as you can easily find great a great variety of online and offline student projects and activities - directions included.

You have to sign up, but no email is required - it's a simple process to pick your "ology" name (mine is Terrible Tyrannosaur), and a password, so it is kid-friendly. Elementary students of all ages can have a great time studying concepts in science with the variety of activities on Ology.

Students can collect interest cards throughout the activities to add to their own stacks and create a "homepage" on the site that keeps track of these.

Science Fun and Learning for K-3

Animal Games has fun games about animals that help children learn animal classification, the difference between herbivores and carnivores, the food chain, endangered animals, producers and consumers, animal diet, and animal characteristics. The games are fun and easy to play and teach some important animal science concepts from our GLE's.

Animal Games is perfect for the kindergarten through third grade classroom. They teach the basics of the food chain, animal kingdom, and animal classification through an interactive game environment.

There are many ways for elementary teachers to work this into your classroom - as a center, on the computer overhead to go through with a whole group with students pointing out answers or giving input and ideas, on a smartboard (if you have one), as a learning activity to be followed up by a project or task that has them apply what they've learned - tons of ways to use it!

The graphics are really nice and colorful but not over the top - very basic - great for the little guys. No sign up or registration - very self explanatory and ready to use. There are a few small ads around the edges, but no biggie.

Some new ways to teach the Periodic Table of Elements

Here are three neat interactive visuals to support teaching the periodic table. These could easily be used with 5th grade science all the way through high school.

The Interactive Periodic Table is, at first glance, a normal looking table, but click on any of the elements and you get a direct link to their Wikipedia entry, complete with at least one picture and lots of information.

The second is the Visual Elements Periodic Table. It's cool looking, but even better, when you click on an element you get information in a very basic, easy to read layout, along with a few more links to view some pictures and get more visual information. Extremely easy to use, great visuals, and the text is very accessible by lower level readers.

The last one is fun and will definitely have a "niche" appeal to certain students - this is the Comic Book Periodic Table. You click on an element and you will get a listing of what comics that element has appeared in. When you click on one of the issues, you get the full page from that comic so you can see the story line, and how the element was used - a great way to bring science fiction and imagination to the periodic table!