Perhaps my favorite thing about living in northern New England is the amount of daylight we have in the summer. I enjoy the early sunrises even more than I do that late sunsets (before I had kids it was the other way around). The longest day of the year is coming up and if your kids, like my kids, have questions about why it's still light outside at bedtime, take a look at these short lessons.
SciShow Kids offers a nice video that can help K-3 students understand why the length of daylight changes throughout the year.
Reasons for the Seasons is a TED-Ed lesson appropriate for upper elementary and middle school students. The lesson explains the relationship between the shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, the Earth's tilt on its axis, and how those affect the amount of sunlight on different areas of the Earth.
And for a little perspective on winter vs. summer solstice here's a great side-by-side time-lapse of the winter and summer solstices in Manchester, England.
Back in March I got an email from someone claiming to be a Boston-based intellectual property attorney working for the law firm of Arthur Davidson. The email was poorly formatted and had some other errors that made me think the email might not be from a legitimate attorney's office. The email also happened to arrive on a day when I was feeling particularly grumpy so I decided to do a little sleuthing to see if I could unravel what I was fairly certain was a scam designed to get me to put a link to a nefarious website on my blog.
There were a lot of routes that I could have taken to pulling back the curtain on this scam. As you can see in the video that I made about it, I unraveled the scam by using some context clues which led me to then use some research tools including WHOIS lookup, reverse image search, Google Maps, and the Wayback Machine.
April Update
In April I discovered that a few other folks had gotten the same email from Arthur Davidson and decided to also unravel the scam. So much so that that the scammers switched from using the domain ArthurDavidson.com to ArthurDavidsonLegal.com.
June Update and Conclusion...for now
Just out of curiosity I checked to see if ArthurDavidsonLegal.com was still being used to try to run a backlinking scam. It turns out that the website has been suspended by the host. I'm guessing that enough people or the right person complained to the hosting service and got the site suspended for running a fraud.
Motorcycles!
If the name Arthur Davidson sounds familiar to you outside of the context of a fake legal firm, you probably have an interest in motorcycles and or you teach U.S. History. Arthur Davidson was one of the founders of Harley Davidson. Did the scammers who set up the fake legal firm of ArthurDavidson.com and ArthurDavidsonLegal.com know who Arthur Davidson was? Possibly. Did they choose those domains to attempt to rank well in search results? Probably, but I have no way of knowing that for sure.
No-Signup Tools is a new site that features exactly what its name implies, web tools that you can use for free without having to sign-up for an account. You can browse through No-Signup Tools alphabetically, by ranking, or by category. Browsing the categories is probably the best way to use No-Signup Tools.
The No-Signup Tools categories of interest to readers of this blog will probably be teaching, writing, and productivity. It was in those categories that I found helpful tools like Math Homework Generator, Egg Timer, and saw an old favorite called Hemingway App.
Applications for Education
Web tools that don't require registration or other personal information can be great for students who don't have email addresses and they can be great for those of us who just don't want to give our email addresses to yet another website.
No-Signup Tools is good, but it isn't specific to education. For a similar resource that was specifically created with teachers and students in mind, take a look at Nathan Hall's list of No Registration Needed Tools.
Last month I started watching a new Crash Course series called How to College. The series is a great one for students who are first generation college students and or those who just don't have anyone to seek out for advice about things like paying for college and picking a major. The latest video in the How to College series is titled How to Work in College.
Watching How to Work in College took me back to my days of loading trucks at RPS (now known as FedEx Ground) at night and in the early mornings to pay for my college education. I was fortunate that RPS put an extra 50 cents per hour into a tuition reimbursement fund that I used every semester to pay for my textbooks (they were a lot cheaper 20-something years ago). It's little perks like that and the networking opportunities that can come out of working in college that How to Work in College does a good job of explaining in the video.
How to Work in College also does a good job of trying to help viewers understand the importance of scheduling their time and it provides some tips for blocking distractions when it is time to focus on school work.
For more information about how to pay for college beyond working a part-time job, students should watch Crash Course's How to Pay for College.
Earlier this week SciShow Kids published a new video titled Unpoppable Bubbles. In the video they don't actually make unpoppable bubbles. Instead, they talk about how bubbles are made and propose some ideas for making bubble mixtures to test to see if it is possible to make an unpoppable bubble.
Applications for Education
Trying to make an unpoppable bubble or at least experimenting with different bubble solutions could be a fun way for parents to introduce their children to some concepts like surface tension and viscosity. For a little more structured lesson centered around bubbles, take a look at the Bubble-ology lesson plan on the Science Buddies website. That's what I plan to loosely follow the next time I make bubbles with my kids this summer.
