Category: Science

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Link: NASA – STS-118 Education Resources

NASA – STS-118 Education Resources. Along with Bud Hunt, Brian Crosby, and a handful of other educators on Twitter, I just watched the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch (on NASA TV). (Eva watched with me here at home, too.) This is an historic mission because teacher Barbara Morgan, who was once an alternate for Christa McAuliffe, is among the crew. After twenty-one years, there is finally a teacher in space. And naturally, NASA has provided a page of online educator resources related to the mission. There’s still a few days left to sign up for the online training sessions (for teachers), so head on over there. :)

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EduPress Advanced

EduPress Advanced – 01 – Backing up EduPress (Via mrbelshaw.co.uk/teaching.) With the loss of Blogger as an option for many Orange County school districts, the options such as edublogs.org, learnerblogs.org, novemberlearning.com, and classblogmeister.com becoa blogging platform like WordPress on a district, school, or private server. Edupress is a distribution of WordPress with a feature set designed specifically for education. That makes this good news: “I’ve decided to name this week EduPress week! In celebration of this fact, I’m devoting five days to showing you how to do ‘advanced’ things with EduPress.”

Pop on over to learn about:

  • Backing up EduPress
  • Configuring EduPress for multiple users
  • Creating a gallery in EduPress
  • Inserting a Contact Form in your EduPress blog
  • Adding extra plugins to EduPress
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U.S. Falling Behind in Global ‘Brain Race’ – Science –

U.S. Falling Behind in Global ‘Brain Race’ – Science – (Via Furl – The mguerena Archive.) Mike Guerena focuses on an interesting quote from this article. Science is one of the most inherently exciting subjects in school, and math one of the most useful. We need to ask ourselves what we’ve been doing that has made these subjects so boring and unpalatable… and of course, what we can do now that we couldn’t do before to make them more exciting and authentic. Project based learning is just a start; it offers context, opportunities for inquiry-driven discovery learning, and of course opportunities for collaboration and social-negotiation of learning. (You may have noticed these things are something of a theme here.) Technologies such as the read/write web, or games and simulations can facilitate this kind of learning.

What I really wanted to do was leave a comment on Mike’s FURL item, but FURL doesn’t support comments. Now, though, that I’ve made the referral here in wordpress, you can leave comments on this post, and even subscribe to an RSS feed to follow any further comments. Not that this will happen, but I’m happy with this change.