SFS Kids - Lessons on Listening and Composing Music

SFS Kids is the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra's website for kids. It is loaded with good activities for elementary school and middle school students.

On SFS Kids students can learn to compose and play music. Your students can jump into any section of SFS Kids and start learning, but it is probably best if they work through the sections in order. Students get started on SFS Kids by listening to samples of different styles of music performed by the symphony. A pop-up dialog box appears with each selection of music. In that dialog box students will learn a bit about the style of the composition and performance they're hearing. After listening to a selection of recordings students move on to playing games in which they try to recognize and match rhythms.

In the "performance" section of SFS Kids students learn about the instruments commonly heard in a symphony orchestra. After learning about how the instruments are played it is time for students to jump into the "composition" section of SFS Kids where they'll work through a series of lessons on the basics of composition and begin writing their own pieces.

Applications for Education
Students could spend an hour on SFS Kids and still not run out of things to explore. In a 1:1 setting you could have students create compositions on the site and then share them in your classroom as mini-concert of original compositions.

Interactive Map - The Battle of Gettysburg

Decisive Moments at the Battle of Gettysburg is an interactive map hosted on Smithsonian.com. The map details events of the battle and the decisions made by commanding officers on both sides of the war. You can navigate the map by using the timeline on the left-hand side of the map or by clicking the placemarks on the map. While viewing the map you will see "eye" icons that you can click to view a panorama of that location. The panoramic view is of Gettysburg as it exists today.

Applications for Education
Decisive Moments at the Battle of Gettysburg could be a good resource to use to support middle school or high school lessons on Gettysburg. The map also provides a good model of using ArcGIS Story Maps to convey geo-located information. Your students could take the model of Decisive Moments at the Battle of Gettysburg and apply it to the creation of their own maps about significant moments in history.

Three Pi Day Video Lessons

Today is Pi Day! March 14 or 3/14. Six years ago Numberphile published a couple of good videos about Pi. I shared them then and I think it's time to share them again. Pi with real pies is a three minutes and fourteen seconds video that explains Pi and how it can be calculated.




After showing the video above, you might want to follow up with this video, How Pi Was Nearly Changed to 3.2.


And here is a more recent video about Pi produced by Numberphile. It's titled A Mile of Pi. As you might guess, it's about a mile of digits.

Where On Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? - A Great Geography Game

The theme song for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is an earworm for those of us who grew up in the 80's or early 90's. And thanks to Google's new partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, we can now share the fun of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? with our kids.

This morning Google launched the first installment of Where on Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? The game can be played in the web version of Google Earth, on the iOS version of Google Earth, and on the Android version of Google Earth. The best experience will be found on the web version by simply going to g.co/carmensandiego.

Where on Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? isn't exactly like the old version that you might have played from floppy disks, but it's fun and could be a good way for kids to apply their knowledge of geography.

To play Where on Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? simply go to g.co/carmensandiego and start "interviewing" witnesses by clicking on the magnifying glass. When you click on an interviewee Google Earth will automatically zoom-in on the location of the interview. Just like in any other use of Google Earth, you can zoom and pan around the area of detail. After talking to the witnesses, use the information to make your best guess as to where you should fly to next to pursue Carmen Sandiego. Good luck!

Live Q&A Recording

This afternoon I hosted a live Q&A session on my YouTube channel in which I answered questions that had been submitted over the last week. Unfortunately, due to the widespread issues with Facebook accessibility that popped up today, I was not able to broadcast on Facebook. So if you were looking for the broadcast on Facebook, I'll have to get your question next week. The recording of the YouTube live stream is embedded below.