Understanding Perspectives in Primary Sources (link opens a PDF) is a free guide that you can download and distribute to your students. The guide leads students through a series of questions designed to help them identify the type of primary source (writing, drawing, audio recording, etc.), who created it, and the context in which it was created (time, place).
Applications for Education
One of the most important aspects of the Understanding Perspectives in Primary Sources guide is in the last section. In that section students are asked, "what evidences does the creator present that you should fact check?" This is important because, in my experience, a lot of students assume that just because something is an old primary source it is therefore infallible as a source of information. The question that I would always ask my students to consider was, "does what you're reading line up with what you already know about this topic?"
Science Friday is a must-bookmark for teachers and students of science. As the name implies, every Friday a new batch of podcast segments about a wide range of science topics is released. Additionally, on Science Friday you will find interesting videos and articles about a wide array of topics in chemistry, biology, physics, space science, and much more. One of the segments that I liked from last week's Science Friday was this one about why a dog's breed may not be a great predictor of its behavioral traits.
Science Friday offers lesson plans, many of them hands-on, that you can find in the education section of the site. To find a lesson plan just head to the education section of the site and then choose a grade level, subject, and STEM practice. The lesson plans include links to the national science standards addressed in the lesson. Lighting Up Celery Stalks is one of the featured biology lesson plans that I think students will enjoy.
We've all done it, you hit "send" on an email then realize you misspelled an important word or you click send and realize that you replied to all instead of just to the original sender. These situations can be either fairly innocuous or downright embarrassing depending upon who the email was sent to and or what was said. Fortunately, there are a couple of Gmail settings that can help you avoid these situations.
Gmail has setting that allows you to unsend an email up to 30 seconds after it has been sent. Gmail also has a setting that lets you change the default reply behavior on group mailings. Both of these features are demonstrated in this video that I recently published on my YouTube channel.
Tools like Google Jamboard and Explain Everything can be great for creating drawings to illustrate concepts. They can also be good tools for students to use to illustrate stories. But sometime you just need a quick and easy tool for students to use to create a drawing or simple animation without having to jump through the hoop of logging into an account. In those instances, the following free tools provide a good way for students to quickly create digital drawings.
Brush Ninja For more than five years now I've been using Brush Ninja to create simple animations. Here's something I wrote about using Brush Ninja a few years ago in an eighth grade class. This video provides a demonstration of how to use Brush Ninja which is free and doesn't require registration. The featured GIF in this blog post was created by using Brush Ninja.
Draw and Tell Draw and Tell is a free iPad app that has been on my list of recommendations for K-2 students for many years. In this free app students can draw on a blank pages or complete coloring page templates. After completing their drawings students then record a voiceover in which they either explain the drawings or tell a story about the characters in their drawings.
ABCya Animate
ABCya Animate is a fun tool that allows students to create animated GIFs containing up to 100 frames. On ABCya Animate students build their animation creations by drawing, typing, and inserting images. Students can change the background of each frame, include new pictures in each frame, and change the text in each frame of their animations. The feature that I like best about ABCya Animate is that students can see the previous frames of their animations while working on a current frame. This helps students know where to position items in each frame in order to make their animations as smooth as possible. Students do not need to register on ABCya Animate in order to use the tool or to save their animations. When students click "save" on ABCya Animate their creations are downloaded as GIFs.
The ski mountain that is about ten miles down the road from where I live has a large array of solar panels. Their goal is to use as much renewable energy as possible. To that end, another solar array is being constructed about a mile down the road. I noticed the progress earlier this week when I drove past it. That got me thinking about how many solar panels will be needed and it prompted me to look in my archives for some resources for teaching about how electricity is generated. Here are a few that I picked out.
How Do Solar Panels Work? is a TED-Ed lesson that covers the basics of what solar panels are made of and how electricity is generated from them. The video also delves into some of the political and societal barriers to solar panel installation and solar array developments.
How Do Wind Turbines Work? is a TED-ED lesson that covers the basics of how wind turbines harness the power of wind to generate electricity. The basic math of wind turbine design is also explained to viewers of the video. Overall, it's a fine lesson but not the most detailed of lessons.
Energy Now News is a YouTube channel featuring videos about energy in the news and educational videos about electricity. Energy 101: Electricity Generation covers the process of producing electricity and getting it to homes and businesses.
Idaho Power offers a short video overview of how hydroelectric dams generate electricity and the process of getting that electricity from a dam to a house. Before you show this video to your students, it might be worth pointing out to them who produced and why they produced it.
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