Block Posters - Use Standard Printers to Print Posters

If you have ever come across an infographic that you thought would make a good classroom poster, you should take a look at Block Posters. Block Posters is a web-based tool to which you can upload a high quality graphic then divide it into letter-sized chunks for printing. Print out each section and put them together on a poster board to make your own poster.

Applications for Education
Most teachers and students don't have ready access to printers that can handle poster-sized paper, but they do have access to standard letter-size printers. When you find a great infographic that you want to display in your classroom, Block Posters is a good tool to use to print it out. Want to create a giant jigsaw puzzle? Block Posters could be useful for that too.

Three Short Lessons on Snow

Here in Maine we received our first snow of the 2014-2015 winter season. There was enough natural snow combined with man-made snow that the ski resort near my house is opening tomorrow. Seeing the snow prompted me to look through my archives for lessons about the science of snow.

Scholastic's Interactive Weather Maker is an online activity in which students adjust temperatures and humidity levels to create rain and snow storms. Students simply move the temperature and humidity sliders until rain or snow begins to show up in the scene on their screens. Adjusting the settings in the Interactive Weather Maker could be a good way for students to see the correlation between humidity and temperature as it relates to creating rain and snow storms.

The episode of Bytesize Science embedded below explains how snowflakes are created.


In the winter when we have fresh snow combined with a full moon I don't have to wear a headlamp to see my dogs in the yard at night. In the following Minute Physics video we learn why the full moon appears brighter in the winter.

A Crash Course on the Effects of Railroad Development

The latest installment to Crash Course World History is all about the effects of the development of railroads during the industrial revolution. The Railroad Journey and the Industrial Revolution isn't about the building of railroads. In the video John Green covers how rail travel led to changes in where people lived, where they vacationed, and how they interacted with each other. A short lesson on the origin of Greenwich Mean Time is included too.

To bring the lesson into a current context, Green also does a nice job of making comparisons between the effects of the development of railroads and the effects of the development of the Internet.


For more resources on railroads, check out Living With Railroads.