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If you somehow wandered into the middle of this column, it may make more sense to start with page 1.

April, 2010

Sites for Teachers

I'm on lots of mailing lists and monitor quite a few RSS feeds from all kinds of education sites. April began with a bevy of emails about various site updates. The first was from the Library of Congress and led me to their updated Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. It has recently been redesigned to include "full-page galleries, savable searches, and easy-to-bookmark pages." I found lots of interesting photos and political cartoons. Many of the images can be easily downloaded, although some don't seem to work that way. Since I'm now retired from full-time teaching and an avid gardener, I gravitated toward their page of World War I Victory Garden images. The Sow the Seeds of Victory image at right really caught my fancy. Sow the seeds of victory! Plant & raise your own vegetables was created in 1918 by James Montgomery Flagg.

eSchool News's SEN Teacher promotes free resources for special needs students led me to the SEN Teacher site that specializes in free "teaching & learning resources for students with special needs and learning disabilities."

An email from WGBH's Teachers' Domain announced a new site, Engineer Your Life, that has free resources "you can use to spark girls' interest in engineering."

Pics4Learning

I ran across what I think is an excellent free image site for teachers and students several years ago. When I began to cut and paste daily postings from Educators' News to make this column, I found that I mention the Pics4Learning site quite often. Their site descriptor may give an idea of why I like the site so much:

Pics4Learning is a copyright-friendly image library for teachers and students. The Pics4Learning collection consists of thousands of images that have been donated by students, teachers, and amateur photographers. Unlike many Internet sites, permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection.

I like the idea of a site of free images for teachers that doesn't require login or requests for permission to use images. Teachers developing materials don't need one more thing to do when preparing materials for their classes. Of course, fair use allows us to use a lot of copyrighted material, but can sometimes raise legal questions that we often lack the expertise to solve.

One can just browse the site, search by keyword, browse their 100 Most Popular, or even find all the images by one contributor. My page of contributions is shown at left. It generally takes a week or two for images contributed to be posted to the site, as each image is screened by the site.

Sharing images on the site doesn't invalidate copyright claims you may have on photos, other than allowing students and teachers to use the images you share "in print, multimedia, and video productions. These could include, but are not limited to, school projects, contests, web pages, and fund raising activities for the express purpose of improving student educational opportunities." (See image use statement.) If you lack a web site or are limited on bandwidth, Pics4Learning can provide an outlet for your images for other educators to use.

Since I really am retired now, I get to go out and do some of those things working folks have trouble getting around to. When I was clearing out some nasty, scrub thorn trees that threatened to take over part of our East Garden this spring, I noticed a nest of very fat, healthy, baby birds. By the time I got my camera, the mourning dove was back on the nest protecting her brood...and watching me very closely, so I grabbed a shot of her and shared it on Pics4Learning and our Desktop Photos page. A few weeks later, I got a shot of earthworms mating, something science teachers often cover, and again shared it on the site. Finding the squabs (mourning dove babies are also called squabs, as are domestic pigeon babies) made me think of pleasant days reading Johnny Tremain with or to some of my classes years ago.

About School Gardens

A 2008 posting about school gardens, especially school vegetable gardens, told of Sowing the Seeds of Gardening in which Jacqueline Mroz tells about the successful Princeton School Gardens program. The Princeton Regional Schools have 15 garden plots that are "being used to teach subjects like math, science and language arts." One of the schools, Riverside Elementary, has a great page of photos and descriptions about their various garden plots. The Princeton School Garden Cooperative has "written a guide (3.1 MB PDF document) that contains the steps for composting, planning and planting your edible garden as well as lesson plans and curriculum links for math, social studies, language arts, science, visual arts and health."

Those thinking about a school garden of some type should find the guide linked above and some of the links below helpful.

March, 2010

Serious Skin Disorder?

I guess I could write about all the space and astronomy images available online any month of the year. It just seemed that I wrote about most of them last March. I threw in the image above, A Burst of Spring, from the NASA Image of the Day Gallery because it looked so unspacelike. It really is "streaks of dark basaltic sand [that] have been carried from below the ice layer to form fan-shaped deposits on top of the seasonal ice" on the surface of Mars.

I frequently feature photos from the NASA Image of the Day and the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) sites on Educators' News such as the galaxy photo (banner) below. Both sources have a well written explanation of each photo posted.

Panorama of the Whale Galaxy, which appeared as the Astronomy Picture of the Day on May 17, 2010, is a 3000 x 753 pixel composite of NGC 4631. The spiral galaxy's slightly distorted wedge shape when seen edge-on led to its popular moniker of the Whale galaxy. The dimensions of the photo (41.667 x 10.458 inches, according to my copy of Photoshop) immediately made me think of its potential as a banner to go above one's chalkboard or whiteboard (if you have a banner printer ). The Whale galaxy is about 30 million light-years away and spans about 140,000 light years. It can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). (Full size image)

Another NASA Image of the Day from January was this stunning shot of Saturn. The moon on the right in the image is Rhea. The photo also shows the shadow of another moon, Tethys, on the left. Multiple images were taken using red, green and blue spectral filters and combined to create this natural color view. "The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on November 4, 2009, at a distance of approximately 808,000 miles from Saturn." As with all images from the NASA Image of the Day Gallery, this one was available for download in a variety of sizes.

If you're teaching Earth and Space Science, the many online sources for space images can be a real gold mine for instructional material. But even for classroom teachers, the images can add a lot to science instruction and for classroom decoration. I used to print and hang in the hall the Astronomy Picture of the Day each day until so many students were stopping to read the photos that I was asked to take them down! I continued printing them daily, hanging them in my room and later putting them into binders. During down time, I'd often find a group of my struggling readers sitting together looking at the APODs of old.

In 2002, I put together a feature story, Out of this World Desktop Pictures about using space photos in the classroom and as computer desktops. While the article is getting a bit long in the tooth, I do go back occasionally and update links on it and keep the list of sources of photos current. For your convenience, here's that list:

• Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
• European Southern Observatory Astronomical Image Gallery
• Hubble Space Telescope Index
• Hubble Gallery
• Hubble Wallpaper page
• Human Spaceflight Gallery - Shuttle Gallery - Apollo Gallery - Space Station Gallery
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Malin Space Science Systems
• National Optical Astronomy Observatory
• 50 Favorite Anglo-Australian Observatory Photographs -- Anglo-Australian Observatory Home Page
• Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (European Space Agency & NASA)
• Kipp Teague's The Project Apollo Archive -- Apollo Image Gallery
• Robert Gendler's CCD Gallery
• NASA- Image of the Day - Gallery
• NASA Images - from the Internet Archive
• The European Homepage for the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: Wallpaper Image Archive
• The European Homepage for the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: Hall of Fame

Science@NASA

Since I'm obviously on a space jag here, I think I'll just break with the chronological listing and include the rest of the space stuff I want to write about.

Dr. Tony Phillips's Science@NASA Headline News sort of disappeared off my radar last year. I found that there had been a reorganization at NASA, with his old link now leading to NASA Science, a very good source, but not what I wanted. The RSS feed for iTunes versions also went dead (and is still down). But once I found the right link, I was back to posting links to the excellent articles on his site written by Dr. Phillips and others in vocabulary appropriate for middle through high school students. The postings include audio files and other language versions.

Some of my favorites this year on Science@NASA include:

• Big Mystery: Jupiter Loses a Stripe
• NASA - An Avalanche of Dark Asteroids
• The Multiplying Mystery of Moonwater
• Spacequakes Rumble Near Earth

I also find Dr. Phillips's site a good way to stay current on happenings in astronomy so I don't miss writing about something like the Perseid meteor shower or the recent and very cool alignment/conjunction of Venus, Saturn, Mars and the Moon.

Stellarium

My favorite, free planetarium and astronomy software, Stellarium, is a great tool to illustrate how the sky will look at a certain time for your students. I used Stellarium to help me locate where in our night sky the recent conjunction of Venus, Saturn, Mars and the Moon would be. Since we had cloudy skies on the night said to be the best viewing, the Stellarium projection at right for August 13, 2010, at around 9:30 P.M. (EDT) allowed me to zero in on the exact location to watch. I had my camera gear ready for the conjunction and wound up with some smashing and surprising shots, including one of the moons of Mars.

Stellarium projection for 8/13/2010	Twilight on 8/13/2010	Stellarium projection	My photo

Stellarium is absolutely fantastic for answering student questions such as, "What was that bright 'star' last night in the west?" Setup involves putting in the current time and date if the application doesn't automatically pick it up from your computer (it should). The application offers an extensive list of locations so that you can localize the display to accurately show your area's night sky. If you're like me and want to set your exact locale, you can enter your latitude and longitude, which are easily found in Google Earth.

Options in the software allow one to add (or leave out) star and planet names and even adjust which ones to show by brightness. Constellation names and lines may also be displayed. At left and right are Stellarium projections from last February of the constellation Orion.

I noticed the latest version of Stellarium now displays the Milky Way! It's available for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, and in my experience, will work on some pretty old, clunky equipment. And since it's free, I really think it's one piece of software every teacher should have on their hard drive.

Poetry for Oral Reading

Another one of those mailing list emails took me to Ginny Thompson's tip on daily poetry reading. Ginny has "one student a day read one self-selected poem a day." She allows time and support for preparation, of course. Ginny recommended several poetry books in her tip and a link to Bruce Lansky's Giggle Poetry site. Her tip appears on the NEA Works4Me site.

My favorite poetry books for oral classroom reading remain the works of Shel Silverstein. Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic were always available to my students from my personal book collection, along with other Silverstein works from the school library. Photocopied pages of the poems often were used as coloring sheets by students.

You're probably way ahead of me on this one. I'm listening right now on iTunes to Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show's The Cover of the Rolling Stone. It was written by Shel Silverstein!