Cooking In a Solar Oven - A Hands-on Science Project

Update June 2022: This resource is no longer available. 

I have been watching a lot of Top Chef re-runs on Hulu lately. In one of the episodes that I watched last week all of the chefs had to cook with a solar oven or a solar stove. Watching that episode reminded me of the solar oven project plan available on Climate.gov. Making a solar oven (link opens a PDF) includes directions for building your solar oven and tips for cooking in it. You and your students can build a solar oven using materials that are commonly found in schools, homes, and grocery stores.

Applications for Education
Making a solar oven and baking some cookies in it could be a great way to get students excited to learn about solar energy. At the middle school and high school levels you could have students experiment with modifications of the original design to see if they can increase or decrease temperatures and cooking times in their solar ovens.

Borrow, Read, and Listen - The Open Library

The Open Library is a part of the Internet Archive. The Open Library is a collection of more than one million free ebook titles. The collection is cataloged by a community of volunteer online librarians. The ebooks in the Open Library can be read online, downloaded to your computer, read on Kindle and other ereader devices, and embedded into other sites. Some of the ebooks, like Treasure Island, can also be listened to through the Open Library.



Applications for Education
Much like Google Books, the Open Library can be a great place to find free copies of classic literature that you want to use in your classroom. The Open Library could also be a good place for students to find books that they want to read on their own. The audio option, while very electronic sounding, could be helpful if you cannot locate any other audio copies of the book you desire.

Winning Blogging Strategies for Teachers

This is the time of year that many teachers start a new blog to communicate with students and their parents. Unfortunately, many of those blogs will fall to wayside before the end of the semester. This coming Tuesday I will host a webinar that can help you not only avoid having your blog fall to the wayside, you can make your blog thrive.

Based on ten years of blogging professionally and personally, Winning Blog Strategies for Teachers is an interactive webinar in which we will look at the reasons why so many blogs don’t last long and what you can do to make yours work better than ever. Whether blogging is a classroom activity that you do with students or a personal activity that you’re doing to enhance your professional life, you’ll learn strategies to make your blog a winner.

In this webinar you will learn:
1. How to choose the best blog platform for you.
2. How to avoid running out of blog post topics.
3. The biggest mistakes people make when starting a blog.
4. Easy blogging activities you can do with your students.
5. Techniques to encourage people to interact with you and your blog.

This webinar will be held live at 4pm EST on Tuesday, September 19th. The cost for the webinar is $20. Registration includes access to the live webinar, live Q&A, handouts, and unlimited access to the recording of the webinar.

Register here!

The webinar will be recorded for those who register but cannot attend the live session.