Satellite Observations of Arctic Change

Satellite imagery gives students, teachers, and professional researchers access to lots of information to analyze and interpret. Through timelapses of satellite imagery students can see how landscapes and seascapes change over time. Some timelapses of satellite imagery can be found in Google Earth. The National Snow & Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder also offers some excellent timelapses based on satellite observations.

Satellite Observations of Arctic Change is a set of eight timelapse maps. Each of the maps shows representations of changes based on information collected via satellite imagery. The maps included in the set are:

• Frozen Ground
• Sea Ice
• Sea Ice Average
• Water Vapor
• Snow Cover
• Vegetation
• Near-surface Air Temperatures
• Annual Minimum Exposed Snow and Ice

Applications for Education

Satellite Observations of Arctic Change could be a useful set of maps to use in a lesson on climate change. The maps alone don't explain what caused changes. The assignment for students to complete is to research the factors contributing to the changes. 

H/T to Maps Mania. 

Nine Lessons About Recognizing Logical Fallacies

In today's social media and online news environments it is as important as ever to teach students how to recognize bias, propaganda, and logical fallacies. Here are two good resources that I like that can help students understand logical fallacies.

The Guide to Common Fallacies is a series of nine short videos from the PBS Idea Channel. Each video covers a different common fallacy. Included in the series are lessons about Strawman, Ad Hominem, Black and White, Authority fallacies. I have embedded the first video in the series below.



Your Logical Fallacy Is is a website that provides short explanations and examples of twenty-four common logical fallacies. Visitors to the site can click through the gallery to read the examples. Your Logical Fallacy Is also provides free PDF poster files that you can download and print.

Eight TED-Ed Lessons for Music Appreciation

One of my favorite extra-curricular activities in elementary school was learning to play the violin and the trumpet. Three+ decades later I can still read music. I'm looking forward to my daughters being old enough to learn to read and play music too. Thinking about that reminded me of a TED-Ed lesson that I found a few years ago. How to Read Music explains the fundamentals of reading music. Watching the video won't turn students into composers over night, but it provides a good start.

TED-Ed offers a lot of interesting and useful video lessons for students. Many of the videos are organized into playlists. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a playlist of all of the TED-Ed lessons about music. To remedy that problem, I made a playlist of my own featuring eight TED-Ed lessons about music.

Twisted Wave - Create and Edit Audio on Chromebooks

When it comes to recording and editing audio Mac users have Garage Band and Windows users have Audacity (it's available for Mac too). Chromebook users have Twisted Wave.

Through TwistedWave you can create and edit spoken audio recordings from scratch. Your completed tracks can be exported to Google Drive and SoundCloud. If you have existing audio tracks in your SoundCloud or Google Drive account you can also import it into TwistedWave to edit those audio tracks. TwistedWave's audio editing tools include options for fade-in, fade-out, looping, sound normalization, and pitch adjustments. The editor also includes the typical track clipping tools that you would expect to see in an audio editing tool.

How to Refine a Search According to Top-level Domain

One of the overlooked search strategies that I often share with students and their teachers is refining Google search results according to top-level domain. Refining a search according to top-level domain is a good way for students to discover high-quality content that might not otherwise rank highly in their search results. The process of refining a search according to domain is rather easy, but it's a strategy that is often overlooked by students and teachers. In the video below I provide a demonstration of how to refine Google search results according to domain.


Learn more about search strategies in my Practical Ed Tech on-demand webinar, Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know.