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

December, 2009

Jason Science

eSchool News featured the Jason Project as its Site of the Week in December, 2009, in JASON Project launches free energy curriculum. The JASON Project, a non-profit subsidiary of National Geographic, offers free science curricula in both downloadable and online interactive units. Currently offered curricula include weather, ecology, and energy.

The units offered are "designed to fit within school districts' core curriculum." The initial unit, Operation Monster Storms, "provides at least five to nine weeks of material with suggested lesson plans, extensions, interdisciplinary connections, and other teacher resources."

Still being a kid at heart, I jumped into the Storm Tracker Lab to sample the site. Lots of basic information (great explanation of latitude and longitude, etc.) was presented in an engaging manner. "My storm" nipped the Yucatan Peninsula before turning and wreaking havoc on the Florida coast. And as you can see at left, I blew the prediction. The simulation went on to explain that the storm I tracked was actually Hurricane Wilma that did significant damage in 2005. My reaction was what I think many students' reaction might be: Can I try it again?

Free International Space Station Calendar

The free International Space Station Calendar appears to be an annual thing with NASA. I downloaded last year's calendar and was impressed with it. The 2010 calendar is just as attractive, although you may have to hunt a bit from the link above for the download. Or, you can just use this download link (10.2 MB PDF document).

Now I'm going to have to decide whether to print and hang the gorgeous ISS calendar or my usual Ansel Adams calendar. Maybe I'll go with two calendars in the office this year.

November, 2009

NASA Images

While I did space stuff on the last page, this one deserves another mention. An article on eSchool News led me to the NASA Images site. NASA Images is a relatively new site created by a partnership "between NASA and the Internet Archive to bring public access to NASA's image, video, and audio collections...to promote education and facilitate scholarship in the math and sciences at all levels, and to build general interest and excitement around space exploration, aeronautics, and astronomy." The Internet Archive is the group that maintains the Wayback Machine, their effort at preserving internet content.

When I tried the site last November, I found its organization and presentation to be excellent. Searches returned large thumbnails of images with popup descriptions. Choosing an image displayed a good description of the item and photo with download options. The site was very busy at times, however, and performance may be a bit slow.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Part of the reason I mentioned the NASA Images site by the Internet Archive is that I wanted to write about their Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It's absolutely fantastic for pulling up old pages and sites. At left is the first week of Educators' News from April of 2001. At right are images of CNN and The New York Times from the same week. The CNN archive goes back through 2000, and the Times through 1996. My first web site didn't get archived, but when I moved it to a new web host, the Wayback Machine recorded it from 1999.

I'm fond of the Wayback Machine, as when I signed up for my first gig as an online columnist, I wasn't wise enough to just sell one time rights to my columns. So, someone else owns the copyright to my first column series, That Other Steve... The site I wrote for has since failed and is no longer available.

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, the columns remain available on the Internet Archive. I've linked to them via my Columns & Editorials index.

Magnum Opus

Keep an eye out for a developing JAVA application, Magnum Opus. It's a puzzle maker from John Stevens, creator of the excellent Crossword Express shareware. Magnum Opus is in beta, and there are lots of unresolved bugs and features not fully implemented yet. I found one that was a showstopper for me, but John generally gets things fixed on his apps pretty quickly. (I emailed John of the problem and got a prompt response that more or less said, "Yeah, we know and are working on it.") While Crossword Express was shareware, Magnum Opus is donationware. You get to pick how much to pay or contribute for its development.

The latest release (2.6 MB) at this writing is the July release.

While John doesn't offer downloads from his site of the old Crossword Express shareware, you can still get both the Mac and Windows versions from CNET. I tell about how I used to use it in Teacher Tools 4: A Roll-Your-Own Spelling Program.

Be a Martian

A NASA press release, NASA and Microsoft Allow Earthlings to Become Martians, led me to the new Be a Martian site hosted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The press release stated, "Participants will be able to explore details of the solar system's grandest canyon, which resides on Mars. Users can call up images in the Valles Marineris canyon before moving on to chart the entire Red Planet. The collaboration of thousands of participants could assist scientists in producing far better maps, smoother zoom-in views, and make for easier interpretation of Martian surface changes."

The server appeared to be seriously overloaded when I tried to access the site in November, but appears to be working a bit better now. There are still some bugs. Trying to access the site via the Anonymous Tourist Visa link in Internet Explorer 8 kept returning me to the start page. Interestingly, Apple's Safari for Windows worked well with the site! The site also requires Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0, which locks out users with older, non-Intel powered Macs (PowerPC G5, G4, and so on). Microsoft never produced a 2.0 version for PowerPC.

October, 2009

Wolfram Alpha

In early October, I nearly missed what appears to be a really good site for educators. A promotional email came in about Homework Day to promote the use of Wolfram Alpha for education on eSchool News, and I even checked out the site. Then, with other responsibilities looming, I totally forgot about the Wolfram Alpha site. I'd guess that the name Wolfram made me think of their advanced software application, Mathematica, which is way, way above my ability level. I once helped a Rose-Hulman grad student get the Mac version of Mathematica running on his iBook.

Fortunately, something jogged my memory and I finally got back to take a good look at Wolfram Alpha. It looks to be a site that many educators might want to try out. While the site is basically a math homework help site, they also suggest users try several searches to acquaint themselves with the site's possibilities. Their suggestions include trying entering a date, town, two stocks, a calculation, or a math formula. Since I'm not a math wizard, I entered our town, Sullivan, Indiana. The results were pleasantly surprising.

Encouraged by my initial success, I tried typing in several important dates in history, important names and such, almost everything but anything to do with math. Wolfram Alpha spit out data and results on each of my searches that could have proved useful if I was doing anything but just messing around.

I did finally enter E=MC² (actually e=mc^2) and was again pleasantly surprised that the site/software obediently retrieved the information requested (without mocking me). Of course, there was far more information than I'm showing at left, but I also liked that it had a pop-up preview about the subject that linked to Wikipedia.

Wolfram Alpha also has a page of simple code to add the site search box to ones web page. Cool!

Full disclosure: Wolfram Research is an Educators' News and Senior Gardening affiliated advertiser.

Open Source Desktop Screen Recorder

Oak Hill High School (IN) science teacher Tom Rademaker recommended an interesting, open source desktop screen recorder he'd tried, CamStudio. He commented, "I have to say it is the easiest desktop screen recorder utility available. Recording and narrating a desktop screen activity only takes a few seconds longer than the actual activity." From just a quick test, I have to agree with him.

"CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your [Windows] computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)." The current 2.0 version has a bug that prevents SWF's for working right in the Firefox browser, but a version 2.6 beta is available for download that addresses that bug. You'll also want to download and install the CamStudioCodec-1.4 (37K).

Spelling Software

I did a posting in October about the replacement for an old spelling shareware I'd used extensively in the classroom. Unfortunately, the new version turned out to be a shadow of its predecessor, but in the course of the posting, I had to mention one excellent application that moved from shareware to freeware a few years ago. Jay Lichtenauer's Master Spell (Mac only) is a dandy practice spelling test application. It became available as a shareware several years after my old school had purchased a site license for another program, or we might have gone with it. Now a freeware, Master Spell uses text-to-speech technology, but also provides an option that allows teachers to record the word list themselves. I prefer the recorded word lists, but they really take a lot of time if you teach in a situation where you have multiple levels of students requiring different word lists. I tell in Teacher Tools 4: A Roll-Your-Own Spelling Program how we were able to raise spelling scores around 10% across the board in our special ed classroom by using such a program.

Courses range in topics from the Sugar OS to ice formations on Europa to Moodle basics and all materials are licensed under Creative Commons. The site is truly not to be missed, whether you’re a *nix fan or not. It also serves as a showcase for the power of Moodle and OSS in presenting coursework.