ELI Videos

The Earth Learning Ideas Video Collection is useful for teaching and learning all things related to geography and geology.

Learn AI with MIT

Mark Wilson writes about a new MIT Media Lab website for K-12 students to learn about AI: Innovating Learning and Education in the Era of AI.

Climate activities for at-home learning

These look fun: Climate activities for at-home learning. Plus can be extended to K-12.

Recruitment and Retention

Fewer Students Are Going To College. Here's Why That Matters is a nice and concise summary of the issues that we are dealing with in Higher Ed right now. My take-away: adults are the key and we (= Westfield State) are not doing a good job making things easy and effective for them.

Anchor Phenomena in Science Teaching

Anchor phenomena is one of the buzz words today in STEM teaching and learning: something that connects a specific activity or learning sequence to something that students find compelling. Here are some resources:

• Tools for Ambitious Science Teaching
• Qualities of a Good Anchor Phenomenon for a Coherent Sequence of Science Lessons
• Selecting Anchoring Phenomena for Equitable 3D Teaching

The Everything Machine

Super-cool from the folks at Tinybop: The Everything Machine allows to to program your own apps that use all the components of an iPhone or iPad (e.g. camera, microphone, etc.) in a fun, lego-style interface. Here's a review on Co.DESIGN.

Also really cool: Simple Machines and Robot Factory.

Playground Physics

And other fun and educational apps for the iPad - introducing Noticing Tools by the New York Hall of Science. Read more over at Co.DESIGN or risk $9.99 to try them.

Advancing the map in US 8th grade Earth Science

Something new from Esri: Earth Science GeoInquiries = new instructional resources designed for the US 8th grade Earth Science class. Read more about it here.

The ACE Climate Assembly

The ACE Climate Assembly is a high school entertainment education program about climate change and sounds a bit like the Climate Reality Presentation associated with Al Gore. Still, this is a question of scale: how can you deliver the science of climate change across the country in way that is engaging and reliable?

• Request your ACE Assembly
• Flora et al. (2014): Evaluation of a national high school entertainment education program: The Alliance for Climate Education

SchoolDigger

Need information about a school - any school? Checkout SchoolDigger.com. The interactive data and graphs for every school are pretty impressive and even includes private schools. Here, for example, is Greenfield High School.

Global Warming Curriculum

Here is a very good eight-lesson curriculum out of Ithaca Collgege useful for teaching a class on global warming / climate change from high school to college. This curriculum is less about the underlying science, but more about how these issues are framed in the media. Have a look at the other material and resources provided by Project Look Sharp and follow them on Facebook!

• Media Construction of Global Warming (curriculum and materials)
• YouTube Channel and associated playlist
• Project Look Sharp (website)
• Project Look Sharp (Facebook) 

AGO for Organization free for K-12

Looks like Esri finally woke-up and is making their ArcGIS Online for Organization subscriptions free for all K-12 schools as part of the ConnectED initiative. That's a good thing and a nice alternative to using Google Earth. Not sure how they will handle the user name and password administration for the students - from personal experience I can tell you that can be a big issue and inconvenience. Here's some more information:

• ConnectED and Esri
• Esri K12 GIS Organization
• ArcGIS Online SkillBuilder
• Charlie Fitzpatrick's comments 

Climate Change for K-12

NeoK12 has some nice short videos for teaching K-12.

• Global Warming
• Energy
• Carbon Cycle
• The Seasons

Doctopus and Goobric

Sounds weird, but if it works in the real teaching world of K-12 it should also work in higher education. So here are two tools for better managing student assignments shared via Google Drive: Doctopus and Goobric. How can you use them? Have a read over at NCS EdTech News.

And then, let's debate if it is really a good idea to farm-out educational technology to a commercial company such as Google offering 'free' things.

EarthLabs, Visionlearning, Earthlearningidea, and More!

EarthLabs is a nice compilation of student-centered lab activities about earth science (targeted for high school students, but also quite useful for college).

• EarthLabs for Educators
• EarthLabs Student Portal

Visionlearning is a free resource for teaching and learning science, for example Biology, Chemistry, etc. as well as science as a process. Includes reading materials, resources, and simple short quizzes.

• Visionlearning

Earthlearingidea is great: real hands-on activities that can be used as part of classes or labs. Mike Tuke also provides great ideas for teaching Geology that can be implemented easily. Finally, Steve Whitmeyer has some great Google Earth material for teaching geology.

• Earthlearningidea
• Mike Tuke's Earth Science Activities and Demonstrations
• Steve Whitmeyer Google Earth

Social Media in K-12

Or in Higher Education...here's an interesting infographic about it. I'll be honest: I have no idea who the source is...the website www.bestmastersineducation.com/ does not indicate anything (which is usually a red flag).

STEM and Gender

Here's a great interactive visualization of the gender divide between high school-aged girls and boys.

• The STEM Gender Divide
• More STEM-related Data Visualizations

K-12 Technology Use

Very interesting infographic - who pays for all that technology? Much the same trends and discussions are obviously also happening at the college and university level. The same is true for the threat of private online education 'providers' and MOOCs...hmm...I wonder if we should talk more?