National Geographic Publishes Fun Facts About All National Parks

As the weather warms in North America more visitors arrive in the 59 U.S. National Parks. Acadia National Park here in Maine is crowded in the summer so come visit in the winter to see another side of the first national park created from land donated to the federal government. That fun fact is one of 59 fun facts in a new National Geographic article listing a fun fact for every national park.

I read through National Geographic's list of fun facts about national parks and I wouldn't call all of them "fun" facts, but it was interesting to read through anyway. Did you know that North Cascades National Park has more glaciers than Glacier National Park? Me neither until I read the article.

Applications for Education
Beyond the fun facts, the article is peppered with beautiful images of the national parks. As I read through the article and looked at the pictures my thoughts turned to having students create short videos that include some of the fun facts found in National Geographic's article. While they cannot use the copyrighted images from the article, they could use a site like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Flickr that has lots of public domain images of the national parks. Adobe Spark Video is an ideal tool to use for creating that kind of highlights video.

H/T to The Adventure Blog. 

A Crash Course in Taxes

The deadline to file income tax returns here in the U.S. is less than one week away. If you have high school students, some of them may be filing taxes (or having parents do it on their behalf) for the first time. That may lead to all kinds of questions about why we have taxes, the way taxes are calculated, and types of taxes. Crash Course has a twelve and a half minute video in which those questions are addressed.


At over twelve minutes long this is one of those videos that despite being full of good information, students will tune out unless given some specific things to watch for in the video. EDpuzzle and TES Teach are good tools that you could use to build some questions into the video before you share it with your students.