eSkeletons - Online Comparisons of Mammal Skeletons

eSkeletons is a great website produced by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. eSkeletons features interactive models of mammal skeletons. Select a model from the menu on the home page then click on any bone in the model to view it in detail. After select a bone to view you can choose from a menu of viewing angles. In many cases eSkeletons offers a short video display of the bone you've selected from the menu.

eSkeletons gives students the option to compare bones across models. Select two or more animals from the menu then select a bone and a small gallery of comparative images will be generated. eSkeletons offers a glossary of terms and a legend to help students understand what they are viewing. Even without the models, the glossary is a good resource for anatomy students.

The Math and Science of Football

In my previous post I featured Financial Football. That's a good game if you're looking for a social studies resource related to the Super Bowl. For math and science resources related to the Super Bowl, take a look at NBC Learn's Science of Football. NBC's Science of Football is a series of ten videos from NBC Learn explaining and demonstrating math and science concepts as they relate to football.

The list of topics covered in the Science of NFL Football includes Torque & Center of Mass, Pythagorean Theorem, Geometric Shapes, Projectile Motion & Parabolas, Vectors, Kinematics, Nutrition, and Newton's 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Laws of Motion.

Applications for Education
Every video in the Science of NFL Football is accompanied by a lesson plan appropriate for use in middle school classrooms. Click here to take a look at the lesson about Newton's 3rd Law.

Learn Money Management Skills by Playing Financial Football

The Super Bowl is just five days away. If you're looking for a football-themed lesson to use this week, take a look at Financial Football.

Practical Money Skills hosts a series of eight online games designed to teach students some money management skills. One of the games that is timely considering that the Super Bowl is just a few days away is Financial Football. Financial Football has students answer questions about budgets, savings, and spending to move their football teams down the field against another team. The games use real NFL team logos. Financial Football takes at least twenty minutes to play.

Educational Resources from the National Snow and Ice Data Center

There is at least 18" of fresh snow in my yard this evening so it feels like a good time to tell you about some educational resources from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder offers some good educational resources related to snow, ice, and environmental science. NSIDC's education center offers sections dedicated to educating students about glaciers, sea ice, snow, and arctic climatology. Most of the resources in the education center are text-based sequences of articles.

Outside of the education center NSIDC offers a large gallery of Google Earth files that you can use to learn about snow, ice, and climate change around the world. NSIDC offers an image gallery containing images captured from research expeditions around the world as well as satellite imagery. Some of the images from the expeditions are simply amazing.

Applications for EducationThe National Snow and Ice Data Center could be a good resource for students of environmental science. The education center is a good primer on snow, ice, and glaciers, but the real value for me lies in the Google Earth files gallery. Contained in the Google Earth files gallery are tours and time lapse imagery that puts the information found on NSIDC into a visual and geographic context that is easy to understand.

Crowd-sourced Advice About Twitter for Teachers

This evening as part of my webinar about blogs and social media for teachers I gave a short demonstration of the difference between an "@" message and a direct message. As a part of that demo I posted and "@" message to Steven Anderson in which I asked him to share a tip for teachers new to using Twitter. Steven replied quickly as did a few other folks who offered some good tips. I've embedded those Tweets below.

@rmbyrne Get organized. Use a client like Tweetdeck to view lists, save tweets and make things easier. And…
— Steven W. Anderson (@web20classroom) January 28, 2015

@rmbyrne Find a hashtag to follow. Check out the Twitter Chat list for some good ones that will be ultravaluable to you.
— Steven W. Anderson (@web20classroom) January 28, 2015

@web20classroom @rmbyrne I agree. TweetDeck is indispensable. Also, follow #edchat for great people to follow
— David Andrade (@daveandcori) January 28, 2015

@rmbyrne @web20classroom find chats that pique your interest, follow them and build up the courage to tweet into them and never look back
— Don Miller (@dmiller212001) January 28, 2015

@rmbyrne @web20classroom Been starting people w http://t.co/1G64PsCwp1 & Clipboard. Follow topic, then people, then engage.
— Beth Holland (@brholland) January 28, 2015