OK Go Explains Primary Colors in Song

From cool Rube Goldberg machines to tightly scripted marching band routines, OK Go produces fantastic music videos. Now they've jumped into making educational videos for kids. In Three Primary Colors, produced with Sesame Street, OK Go explains the three primary colors in a catchy little song.



Applications for Education
After your students get the catchy Three Primary Colors song stuck in their heads, have them try creating pictures using the Three Primary Colors game on the Sesame Street website.

H/T to Brain Pickings. 

29 Days of Android Apps for Teachers and Students

As you may know, in December I started a blog about Android apps for schools. Today, because it is February 1st I decided to put together a list of 29 of my favorite apps that I think educators and students should try over the next month. The list is embedded below as a Google Docs presentation.

Think Binder - A Place to Share Notes and Chat

Think Binder is a new website that gives students a place to create online study groups. In each group students can share files, share links, chat, and draw on a collaborative whiteboard. Students can create and join multiple groups. As you will see in the video below, getting started with Think Binder takes just a minute.
Embedded below is my brief video overview of Think Binder.

Applications for Education
For students working on group projects, Think Binder could be a good place to organize their findings and hold brainstorming sessions through chat. The collaborative whiteboard space could be helpful for drawing diagrams of ideas for group discussion.

Video - What is an IPO?

The tech and business worlds have been buzzing all week about the seemingly impending Facebook IPO. Your students may have heard about it too. This would be a good a time to teach students about how companies end up on the stock market and why they offer shares in their companies. CNN's Explain It To Me series has a new video explaining what an IPO is and why companies like Facebook put shares up for sale. The video is embedded below or you can watch it here.

Search for Images by Drawing an Image

For a while now we have been able to perform Google Image searches by uploading images from our computers. This morning, through Mashable, I learned about a neat image search tool that allows you to draw an image and search for images that are similar to it.

The Unofficial Google Image Search by Drawing tool provides you with a drawing space and some simple drawing tools to create a sketch. When your sketch is complete just click "search by drawing" and you'll be sent to the Google Image search results that best match your drawing.

The Unofficial Google Image Search by Drawing tool can also be used to upload and draw on an image that you have stored on your computer. If you want to search for pictures of yourself or pictures of people that look like you, you can use your webcam to take a picture of yourself and search through the Unofficial Google Image Search by Drawing tool.

Embedded below is Mashable's video overview of the Unofficial Google Image Search by Drawing tool.


Applications for Education
This approach to image search could be useful for students who have an idea for an image, but can't quite find it by using search terms in Google Image search.